Not so much a series about climbing as about the personal life of a public figure - Hillary (Sir Edmund)

The first thing to note about the 6-part PBS series Hillary is that it's not about Hillary Clinton - it's about Sir Edmund Hillary, the first European and probably the first man to reach the summit of Everest (1953). But it's by no means another great climbing movie, a la Free Solo or Meru. limbing's just a small part of it, and in fact the series reaches the summit, so to speak in episode 3. All of the climbing scenes are staged and re-created, using some kind of double exposure to give a background of Himalayan peaks, but it's always apparent that this is not a documentary by any means. In place of the dramatics of death-defying exploration - we know that Hillary survives and succeeds, obviously - we get a close look at Hillary's life and his personality, and from the little I've read about Hillary the filmmakers stay close to the facts. He was a small and reticent youth and a shy and retiring man, who early in life found great difficulty in speaking and was especially awkward around women - a loner, a bit of an eccentric, nearly crushed by the doctrinaire behavior of his bullying father (the series drops this theme about partway through - whether the father mellowed or Hillary came into his own is hard to say). Though he's best known for his feats on Everest, we see that he literally had nowhere else to go after achieving that goal; everyone wanted a piece of him, but he couldn't find anything to do that held his interest. Eventually he joined an Antarctic expedition as an underling, which led to much isolation from his family for months at a time (somehow, though he seemed deeply in love with his wife, Louise, he seemed to need to get away on these long-term adventures as well) and led to serious conflict w/ the expedition leader, a blowhard and a fool. Next Hilary took on a ridiculous job sponsored by the World Book: a search in the Himalayas for Yeti - a circus stunt, really, and far beneath him, but he had no real alternative. Though we see only a glimpse of it in this series, he later years were filled w/ charitable work for the Nepalese and political engagement for liberal causes (notably, reproduction rights) in his homeland, New Zealand. The series is not as exciting as I or most viewers I would guess would hope and expect, but on the other hand it's a surprisingly moving look at the developing personality and maturation of a world adventurer and celebrity.