‘America’ Aims to Reveal Truths About the Country

Now that CNN has joined the crowd by launching its weekly “Impact,” television needs another magazine series like it needs, well, another magazine series. In other words, not a lot.

Not that tonight’s new entry on PBS, “Imaging America,” resembles other magazine hours. For one thing, none of the usual headline chasing for this production from New York’s WNET-TV. Instead, each program focuses on a single city, bringing together a spate of segments of varying lengths that together are meant to reveal essential truths that project America in microcosm.

And another difference: no glitz.

So much for the good news, for if tonight’s Portland, Ore., profile is typical, “Imaging America” is shallow, tedious, leaden with talking heads and a program without a center.

Opening topics include a dairy farmer, conflicts between growth and slow-growth factions, differences among skinheads, the city’s Laotian Hmong immigrants and triumphs over adversity--none very compelling, none going much below the surface.

Perhaps a more inviting slice of America awaits next week, in Phoenix.

* “Imaging America” premieres at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.