I'm a major geek for politics. I could tell you considerably more about which candidate came in third in what primary of 1996 than any sensible person would want to know. But I've come up with a considerably more interesting and worthwhile point of attention recently. I spent a good part of the couple of days around the 2008 Iowa caucuses watching a really excellent History Channel documentary series on The Presidents.

This was originally eight one hour programs (about 45 minutes per without commercials) that first aired in 2005, available on three DVDs. That figures out averaging about eight minutes times each president. Now of course there's only so much ground you can cover in that time, but they get surprisingly much into that frame.

Looking at it, these entries mostly seem like just enough to give an attentive viewer some sense of the interesting particulars of how each president got there, what they were like personally and in their management style, how they were regarded in their time (often very different than how they are regarded now), and their most significant accomplishments and failures. One of the simple and effective standards for each of the 43 presidents is basic baseball card type graphic, an image, signature and dates on front, and a basic personal checklist on the back.

That's a fairly effective set of simple visual aids that get combined with a lot of fairly densely layered but generally easily grasped details, starting with a good straightforward narration. But then the benefits of a properly budgeted History Channel show adds a lot in visuals.

Of course, there's lots of video and such of the modern presidents, but they got a lot of good out of all kinds of vintage paintings of both action scenes and portraits of the pre-photographic presidents and modern shots of historical places, and the talking head historians have maybe just the right amount of face time, giving 30 seconds or a minute to effectively stop the cutting back and forth of images to make important analytical points.