After seven hours of (very entertaining) football on Sunday, I decided there was no reason to get off the couch the rest of the night. So, since I had been subjected to a minimum of 100 promo spots for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles while watching both Peyton Manning and Tony Romo go down to defeat, I decided, "What the hell? I'll drop another Keystone Light in the cozy and see what kind of a mess FOX (actually Warner Brothers TV) has made of one my favorite sci-fi series."

The first two flicks, the James Cameron productions, were great fun. The third was the inevitable  milking of the cash cow (and now there's talk of a fourth on the fan websites). But a network TV series? Come on! We're talking big time, expensive spectacle. Semis and motorcycles in concrete drainage ditches. Shape shifting, liquid metal cyborgs. On TV?

Part two of the premiere episode ran last night 8 p.m., and I actually tuned in, again. Although the way FOX was wringing commercials out of the opening hour during the first part, this could have been one for the old DVR. At one point, FOX ran three minutes of the show before breaking for four minutes of commercials. (Tell me network TV doesn't have a death wish.)

Anyway, David Nutter, an old hand from The X-Files, directed the opener with plenty of feature-film verve. Accepting that we are now on network prime time, where women viewers outnumber men for almost every program—meaning that writers are under orders to build in more nurturing mom-and-son "relationship" issues whenever possible—, the opener still delivered remarkably good thrills. The shootout in the classroom was particularly startling.

If The Sarah Connor Chronicles follows the usual formula, 50 percent of the series's annual budget for crowd scenes, exteriors, and computer effects is getting burned up in these first two nights. After that . . . just watch, longer and more "relationship" scenes.

Long-term, I might get bored with the hot chick cyborg that was sent back from the future to protect the Connors. A size-two killing machine/eye candy, she is replacing gigantic Ahhhnold from T2. I sense no great acting chops in Summer Glau, who plays the petite bullet-catcher for the two humans, but she gets a break for being able to deliver all her lines with a kind of glazey-eyed robotic detachment. Also, while I'm at it, since we establish that Sarah Connor is thirty-three when we meet her here in 1999, and "little" John is, what, a Hollywood 17? . . . I'm smelling potential statutory issues for the long-gone daddy.

Anyway, after checking out the latest Terminator, I dropped in the DVD for the season premiere episode of The American Experience, titled, "Oswald's Ghost." It ran last night at 8 p.m. on Channel 2. And will be repeated tonight at 8 pm on ch. 17. (The DVD is also available now.)

The documentary is yet another look at the forty-four-year-old mystery of who killed JFK, a case most reputable journalists declared solved within two hours of Kennedy's killing in 1963 when the Dallas cops picked up Oswald; declared, "we think we have our man;" and waved off questions about anyone else being involved.

Filmmaker Robert Stone (no relation to Oliver) interviews Norman Mailer, Warren Commission critics Mark Lane, Edward Jay Epstein, and Josiah Thompson along with historian Robert Dallek, '60s activist Tom Hayden, and others for their sense of what both the killing and the unanswered questions did to the United States. The film draws a tight, clear line from wide and deep public doubts about the the Lone Gunman theory to doubts of official honesty in the escalation of the Vietnam War, the election of Richard Nixon, and on, and on.

I confess to having had a long-term fascination-to-the-point-of-obsession with the Kennedy case. I was eleven when he was killed, and it was, as Stone is discussing here, a moment that came like a slap in the face to everyone who thought the United States somehow was living in a state of divine grace, impervious to the kind of horrors visited on every other culture since the beginning of time. Since '63, I've read literally dozens of the 2,000 some-odd books written on the case and watched practically every documentary ever made on the topic, rolling my eyes at the lunacy of most and the blundered group-think of others.

My standard line is that I have no idea who actually killed Kennedy (although the mob, via Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana, and New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello with their foreign CIA assassination team connections is still my best guess), but of all the theories, the Warren Commission's is one of the least credible.

For all my obsessive consumption of JFK minutiae, Robert Stone's very stylish film delivered a couple bits I had never seen/heard before: A recording of a sodium pentathol interrogation of Perry Russo, one of the collection of very weird New Orleans characters dug up by Jim Garrison in 1966 and '67, and Dictaphone recordings of conversations between Lyndon Johnson (who never bought the Warren Commission line either) and Attorney General Ramsey Clark on the topic of Garrison's investigation.

For a journalist today to say out loud that he thinks JFK (and the country) was the victim of an organized hit is like saying he saw Elvis parking his flying saucer at Trader Joe's. You might as well fit yourself with a tin foil hat. Personally, I've learned to just stuff it. If for no other reason than, as this film reminds us, this is a mystery that will linger forever.

That said, the film concludes more or less with the conventional wisdom that Oswald acted alone. But along the way, it asks several of the most provocative questions. Such as: Amid a vicious and well-funded arch right wing hate campaign against Kennedy in Dallas, with tycoons and nutball quasi-military types  accusing him of selling out to Communism, he is murdered . . . by a leftist sympathizer? Who is then murdered by a petty nightclub-owning mob wannabe?

"Oswald's Ghost" also makes the point of wondering how much different the public's reaction might have been, or would be today, if we had all watched the famous Zapruder film over and over on cable TV or YouTube?

"Oswald's Ghost" includes Dan Rather's infamous 1964 "reenactment" of what he says he saw in an exclusive one-time only screening of the Zapruder film very soon after the assassination. (For the uninitiated, Rather has been vilified for years—by "conspiracy nuts"—for claiming that the film clearly shows Kennedy's head being forced forward and down by the impact of the final bullet. It was years before the actual moving film was made available to the public with its horrifying depiction of Kennedy's head exploding and his head and body being jolted . . . backward and to the left by the fatal shot.)

If after watching "Oswald's Ghost" you feel some compulsion to take a deep dive down into the rabbit hole of all things 11/22/63, you might want to check out the very engrossing (and brutally excoriated), The Men Who Killed Kennedy. Or, if like a good UFO yarn, you just want the thrill of pure fiction, pick up a copy of the 2002 feature film Interview with the Assassin, a cannily well-composed and eerily well-acted faux documentary that trades in most of the elements of the mystery.