Emilio Estevez has an inoffensive, if totally ineffective, new movie out called Bobby, which I reviewed in this week’s Mercury. It’s about the night Robert Kennedy was shot, but even sadder than the subject matter is the fact that the movie spends all its time focusing on ensemble story lines that play out like an ABC TV movie.

Wanna see an embarrassingly hippified Ashton Kutcher going on a fake-ass LSD trip? Demi Moore as a washed up alcoholic lounge singer? Christian Slater as a racist kitchen manager? Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte bumbling around like a couple of useless fogeys? Then go see Estevez’s movie.

But if you’d rather dive into the real story of one-time presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy—the antithesis of our current dumb-as-a-rock-and-just-as-compassionate president—click over to OPB tonight at 9:00 for “American Experience”, which is featuring a two-hour show on Kennedy.

From the PBS website:

Robert Francis Kennedy would almost certainly have been president if his violent death hadn’t intervened. He was brave, claims one biographer, “precisely because he was fearful and self-doubting.” This probing and perceptive biography reassesses the remarkable and tragic life of the third Kennedy son, the boy Joe Sr. called the “runt.”

Featuring extensive interviews with family members, friends, journalists, Washington insiders, and civil rights activists, the film chronicles the pivotal role RFK played in many of the major events of the 1960s—the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam. The film looks closely at Kennedy’s complicated relationships with some of the leading figures of his day, Martin Luther King and Lyndon B. Johnson, among them. And it reveals much about his personal world, his role as family mediator, his involvement with Marilyn Monroe, and his overwhelming grief and guilt following the assassination of his older brother.