Moyers Soars in Series With a Myth Master

Watch Bill Moyers tonight and you’ll see someone who smiles a lot, obviously happy just to be in the company of Joseph Campbell, a man of sweeping intellect, vitality and teaching spirit.

A towering authority on mythology, Campbell died last October at age 83, leaving behind not only a wealth of published works, but also a video legacy--23 hours of interviews that he taped with Moyers during the last two summers of his life. They were edited into a six-part series for PBS that glows with a vibrant magic.

“Moyers: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” arrives at 10 p.m. on Channel 28, becoming one of television’s infrequent brain-massaging pit stops. No wonder students packed Campbell’s lectures at Sarah Lawrence College. If you crave exhilaration, here’s your fix.

Although each hour program is beautifully threaded with illustrations, photographs and film clips, the soul of this series is Campbell-speak--witty, stirring and elevating. So much for that old saw about talking heads being necessarily musty.

Tonight Campbell and Moyers discuss heroes of myths ranging from ancient tales to George Lucas’ “Star Wars” trilogy. Campbell inspired and influenced Lucas, whose Skywalker Ranch in California is where most of these interviews were taped. By resisting the “dark side,” Luke Skywalker became a hero to emulate, Campbell says.

The superb Moyers, that restless journalistic nomad who has spent much of his career wandering between PBS and CBS in search of fulfillment, is in top form here, setting up the banquet table that Campbell fills with ideas.

Campbell is animated, charming and vital.

“My life has been that of a maverick,” he says. “I would not submit.” In that, he shares something with his questioner, who has cut his own impressive figure as a maverick of TV journalism, at times accepting the enormous salary of a news superstar while resisting the shackles of a system that tends to homogenize or neutralize. Moyers is that television rarity, an explorer with a yearning for discovery. The creative spirit lurks outside traditional boundaries, he and Campbell agree tonight.

Campbell is able to weigh life in mythological terms. “The real dragon is in you,” he says, metaphorically. “That’s your ego holding you in: What I want. What I can do. What I think I love. . . . What I regard as the aim in my life and so forth. It might be too small, It might be that which pins you down.”

“How do you slay the dragon?” Moyers asks.

“Follow your bliss,” Campbell responds.

You can’t follow this delicacy of a series without wondering when, if ever, television will slay its dragon, when it will do more reaching than flinching, when it will look toward the far realms of possibility, when there will be more explorations of outer domains and the deep, mysterious Darth Vaders of our minds. You wonder, too, if television has created its own mythology, and if so, where it will lead.

“These bits of information from ancient times have to do with themes that have supported man’s life, built civilizations, informed religions over millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage. . . ,” Campbell says next week about the relevance of myths.

In hearing him describe the story of creation in Genesis, it occurs to you that those who control television often ignore the crucial mandate underlying their own medium’s creative process: Let there be light.

Let there especially be more series like this. Speed and form matter most in today’s TV. How wonderfully strange, in this era of 30-second sound bites and talk shows where talk is empty, to encounter a six-hour sound bite that stimulates and fulfills.

Campbell urges us to discover our own sacred spot, “a place of creative incubation.” In television terms, “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” may be it.

Remember: Follow your bliss.