what might have been; Joan Juliet Buck finds that the frisson of destiny and the lure of hindsight make fictional and historic politics on TV irresistible.

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

Presidential greatness. Roll of drums, cheers of crowds, martial music, a nation's hopes focused on one man. It must be autumn.

"Was it clear already, in the boy growing up, the struggle to take place between his noblest ambitions and his basest flaws?" asks the baggy-eyed talking head from Harvard. "Was the man so often referred to as the 'Great Believer' a believer from the beginning?" asks another. The ex-wife, taut-skinned, ladylike, fragile, says, "I could never have predicted how things would change, how the world would change." A wave of nostalgia for the characters engulfs you before you have even met them. The subject is a recently dead president, the central question is "Would we have known then we were in the presence of greatness?," the genre is mock documentary, the show the WB's Jack & Bobby, and it's not about the Kennedys, because the talking heads come to us from the year 2049.

These brothers (played, as kids, by Logan Lerman and Matt Long) are the sons of a single-mom college history professor called Grace McCallister, an eccentric who likes a little joint at the end of the day. Which boy will be photographed from the back, in Kennedy mode, "on the cusp of wresting victory from the jaws of near certain defeat"? Will it be the older one, handsome, well-adjusted Jack, who prizes cool a little too much? Will it be sensitive, oddball little Bobby? The president we are talking about will be elected in 2040, so we have a good 36 years' worth of plot coming at us, and that's without counting either of his terms in office. The show alternates the pompous yet sensitive talking heads giving their recollections and assessments of president McCallister with filmed sequences of the daily life of Jack, Bobby, Grace, and a pretty girl called Courtney Benedict. (Will she be First Lady? Of course. Just look at that name.)

Jack & Bobby debuted in mid-September (Sundays, 9:00 p.m.), and it's a winner. Its creators, the writers Thomas Schlamme (The West Wing, Ally McBeal) and Greg Berlanti (Everwood, Dawson's Creek), have enormous fun with the tension between public memory and private events, and they use the audience's predisposition to be thrilled by notions of destiny, political power, and personal greatness to spice up every scene of what I'm tempted to call the "drama" part of the show, forgetting that even the talking heads are "drama." Grace is made to embody all the liberal concepts of today, and the towering, masterful, incandescent Christine Lahti infuses her part with some of the grandiose love that we feel for lost leaders and the mothers of lost leaders. Jessica Pare, as Courtney, is sharp and quizzical.

By the end of the pilot we were perfectly happy to think of today ...