In fact one of the best things on television ever. The production values! The world locations! The casts! The action sequences! The star directors involved! Did George Lucas personally spend half his vast fortune providing the budgets? Indiana Jones, as a young man or child, has a series of adventures, highly entertaining ones as he gets older and takes part in various revolutions and the First World War, and on the way encounters many of the great or notorious figures (and important ideas) of the early twentieth century. He has romances with Mata Hari and a suffragette played by Elizabeth Hurley. His mum is chatted up by Puccini, his dad teaches him about democracy in Athens. He befriends Tolstoy, Schweitzer, Hemingway, Kafka, Erich von Stroheim and Lawrence of Arabia to name but some. Even as a reasonably educated grown-up I learned a lot, in particular about lesser-known fronts of WWI; but all in the form of thrilling Boy's Own adventures - some of the war episodes especially are as good as any film.Amid uniformly excellent casts Sean Patrick Flanery as the university-aged Indiana and Lloyd Owen as his father must be singled out. But almost every role is filled by someone great, usually a stalwart British character actor. (To give some idea of the expense and trouble that must have been gone to, Harry Enfield, then already a huge star here, appears in one episode as a chauffeur who if I remember rightly doesn't even talk.) Really this is the best thing George Lucas has ever done. (I hope at some point he does something similar for other periods of history - I would love him to get the rights to the Flashman books, for example.) Tremendously entertaining, and a good thing to get hold of for a youngster you'd like to learn a bit of history.

Sorry but every time I give this show a chance, it bores the crap out of me. I haven't seen all the episodes. The ones I've seen didn't have Indy chasing after totems with any powers, while that was all the fun of the films. I don't particularly need to know where Indy came from. I also didn't think the actors looked or acted anything like Indiana. There's a reason this show wasn't a hit. Boring. Lucas and Spielberg should have been developing a 4th Indiana movie at this time, when it was still relatively REMEMBERED by people. Instead this is what we got, while they waited to make the 4th Indy movie after a whole generation of 18 year olds don't even know who Indiana Jones is. They're just milking this concept mad hard while only the first film, Raiders, is standing the test of time. How many people even bought Temple and Crusade individually and not part of a box set with Raiders? Indiana Jones was one badass MF when he chased after the Ark. You could drag him behind a truck and put a bullet in his arm and he'd still defeat several Nazis with nothing but his fists. The flaw is that all later films and shows seemed to forget this Indy in order to kiddy it up a little instead. That never works. Look what they did to Die Hard.

In terms of production values and what you see on screen, this show is excellent. Lucas and Spielberg have clearly thrown money at this project and it's all up there. Excellent cinematography, great costume and set design, some very good action scenes (the WW1 trench scenes are very well done), great use of locations but...............The show stinks. Lucas and Spielberg have shown, yet again, throwing money at a project and indulging the art department do not make for good entertainment. Young Indiana Jones, as played by both actors is deathly dull and very irritating. I cannot believe this person will grow into Harrison Ford's portrayal of the character. River Phoenix showed some wit and gave Indy a resourcefullness, cunning and never say die attitude. In this show, Indy just blunders from situation to situation, never learning and never growing as a character. He just stumbles around as a goofy American kid bumping into famous historical figures.And that's another irritating point about the show. We get treated to yet another rent-a-British-character-actor in period costume saying "hello, I'm Franz Kafka", "I'm T.E. Lawrence", "I'm Charles DeGaulle" and we the audience are supposed to wink at the screen and go "oh isn't that clever how they've woven young Hitler into the story". No, it isn't clever, just cringeworthy; it treats real life and people with a sneer as though they are merely worth a walk on part. The scripts are generally very poor, the dialogue risable and the acting bad; you expect more from a quality European supporting cast but somewhere, and I suspect it's from the directors and producers, it turns into bad pantomime. The history, such as it is, looks good on the surface but reeks of being gleaned from a junior school starter book on the Edwardian and WW1 era. Once again, Hollywood's master cheese makers, Lucas and Spielberg show they are incapable of really getting to grips with real cinematic themes. Set it in the past, show how silly the Europeans were back then, avoid any profundity and just let the dollars pour in.

This is a unique and brilliant piece of historiography. Reminiscent of Upton Sinclair's Lany Budd series, but much better. The places and people and their ideas are presented interestingly, colorfully, and authentically. Ataturk, De Gaule, Schweitzer, Mata Hari, etc., etc.---Wow! The whole thing should be on a video set and redone regularly on TV.