‘Iconic America: Our Symbols and Stories With David Rubenstein’ Review: National Explorations on PBS

© Boston Red Sox

David Rubenstein—business leader, Washington insider, mover, shaker and a philanthropist of considerable renown—is too smart to imagine himself an electrifying TV personality. As host of “Iconic America: Our Symbols and Stories With David Rubenstein,” he might best be described as endearingly colorless. But the concept behind the program sparkles, even if Mr. Rubenstein doesn’t.

As explored in the eight-episode series, the subjects are not the big-ticket, big-budget Ken Burns-style thematic launch points—jazz, or the Old West or the Civil War. But each chapter does represent something about America that is under-explored and worth exploring, if only because it is so sorely taken for granted. The concept of The Cowboy, for instance—what it means to American mythology and where we get it wrong, presumably. (Only the first episode was reviewable at press time.) Or the Hollywood sign, originally a real-estate come-on and the site of an early movieland suicide. Or the Gadsden (“Don’t Tread on Me”) flag. Or the Golden Gate Bridge. Or Fenway Park, the focus of episode 1.

Why Fenway? Why not Yankee Stadium? Or the Brooklyn Bridge? The latter has been done by both Mr. Burns and David McCullough, and the relatively new Yankee Stadium contains neither the folklore nor the neuroses of the 111-year-old Boston landmark, our oldest active ballpark. Mr. Rubenstein isn’t really out to autopsy sports or architecture, though. He’s out to make a show about ideas, and that’s how the subjects are selected and approached.

Fenway, for instance, represents “community, family, loyalty and resilience” to Mr. Rubenstein, “resilience” being the quality most closely associated with Red Sox fans who, if they were old enough, had to wait 86 years between the team’s 1918 World Series victory and their next one, in 2004. (They have won three since, the most by any MLB team this century.) As explained by architecture critic Paul Goldberger (author of “Ballpark: Baseball in the American City”), a stadium like Fenway represents a kind of double-play of national ideals, the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian, the rural and the urban. “This beautiful thing, dropped right in the middle of the city,” someone calls Fenway, which adds up to a refreshing way of looking at something familiar.

The equally familiar, ornate and heartbreaking history of the Red Sox is reviewed, from the 1920 sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees, to the rise and glories of Ted Williams in the ’40s, to the 1967 Seri es, which was lost to the Cardinals, to the ’86 Series, which was lost—in almost classic Red Sox fashion—to the Mets, and the crushing defeat by the much-loathed Yankees in 2003 for the American League pennant. As several of Mr. Rubenstein’s Boston-bred interview subjects attest, faith in the team’s failure formed a bond among its fans.

That the degree of multigenerational devotion to the Red Sox is a rare thing anywhere is a point wellmade; Fenway had been, till 2004, a crucible of tolerance and pain. So it seems a logical place to locate a study of sports allegiances, fidelity to seemingly lost causes (the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain, Ga., will be the subject of a future episode) and where to place the blame for one’s disappointment: The cause of the many Red Sox disasters was often blamed, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, on the “curse of the Bambino,” a.k.a. the notorious sale of Ruth to the Yankees. But maybe the curse wasn’t about Ruth, Mr. Rubenstein muses; maybe it was all about Boston’s segregated profile and racial attitudes and the team’s failure to integrate its roster until every other major league organization had done so. The question certainly provides a way of getting into some necessarily uncomfortable territory, but as a segue it feels forced and presumes that one believes in curses and hoodoo and some kind of cosmic retribution for social ills. If only.