Nimrod Nation

At first, director Brett Morgen was just intending to shoot some quirky commercials about a basketball-crazed town in a back corner of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. But then he realized he had found a real-life Northern Exposure, and he decided to make an eight-part television series there. What emerges is a symphonic, sympathetic rendering of Red State America. Morgen locates the lyricism of rural life — a patriarch walking in the woods with his grandson, codgers mixing it up at the diner, an extended family out ice fishing. But he also effortlessly captures percolating drama: a flare-up between Natives and whites, a botched attempt to slaughter a pig and, of course, the never-say-die fortunes of the scrappy basketball squad, the Nimrods, a name whose modern meaning is a far cry from the biblical "mighty hunter." (PS)