By then, we'd seen the Obama family – parents and two young girls – enter the White House for their first tour with the Bushes. In a diabolically deft touch, we were treated to the sight of Michelle Obama (Viola Davis) reacting subtly with the older Black retainers among the White House's domestic staff. The stares of the latter at the House's new residents suggested both wonderment and puzzlement. That was counterpointed with the new first lady's face suggesting unavoidable rue and melancholy.

I said to myself "Damn, that's good. A brilliantly subtle way to present an idea I've always wondered about myself: How did these two, up-to-the-second avatars of an era people deludedly thought was 'post-racial' deal with the remnants of another era's old servant class, where Black workers at the White House were assumed to be working class nobility?" (Duke Ellington's father was a White House butler. It's no accident that he had a lifelong, satiric sense of his own entitlement.)

We were then introduced to Michelle Pfeiffer playing Betty Ford. The first thing we see is her, flimsily clad, drinking and dancing Þ a kind of proto-twerk by a former Martha Graham dancer while her stereo played Harry Nilsson's "Coconuts." ("Put the lime in the coconut/drink a bowl up.") There, in blinking neon, were the thundering superior possibilities of great TV drama: the return of a great and far-too-seldom seen American actress in the kind of major archetypal role she deserved.

But that, as I said, was in the show's first 10 minutes.

Fifteen minutes later, I had fallen hopelessly out of love into an irredeemable and non-negotiable disappointment. I was, and remain, convinced they had blown it. Big time. They had a great idea and a mind-boggling cast and they threw it away. Somehow, they had managed to overlook both the size of their subject and their own cast.

The American first lady is a great and weirdly under-explored dramatic subject. In the world of hype and crass salesmanship, our first ladies are invariably offered to Americans as heroines of domesticity. And yet the conflict of that with their actual, often formidable and ornery personalities, can turn them into primal rebels in their eras.

Eleanor Roosevelt, for instance, who reacted to the Daughters of the American Revolution's racist banning of a concert by Black contralto Marian Anderson by wangling a spot for it at the Lincoln Memorial. THAT's a statement and then some. Or Betty Ford, who insisted to American media that her real self mattered, even if that involved alcoholism and addiction recovery as well as the hitherto never-discussed malady, breast cancer.

The heroism of Betty Ford is unconditional for a simple reason: It was her nature to insist that the revelation of reality was the only point of her being who she was.

These are the subjects of "The First Lady": Eleanor Roosevelt, played by Gillian Anderson, Betty Ford, played by Pfeiffer, and Michelle Obama played oh-so-carefully by Viola Davis – world-shakers all, right along with their husbands.

And the actresses who play them were brilliantly chosen. A truly great cast, any way you look at it.

And the entirely wrong game plan to put it all to work, a series of impressionistic, hourlong weekly shows on Sundays where we're shown a kind of "parallel lives" of a sort Plutarch might have approved.

The trouble? However brilliant the occasional impressions of each woman, they are all irredeemably minimized. They might as well have invented a show called "American Writers" and had A-list Hollywood actors show off playing Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and James Baldwin in little pieces of dramatic spritz.

Yes, it's the inadvertent job itself that is important with first ladies. But it is precisely their thorny individualism that made each woman important. It is precisely their refusals to go along to get along that we revere. Pulling them back into a kind of dramatic class only makes them smaller.

Among the more detestable folk sayings of media in our time is this one: "Go big or go home." It seldom applies to anything aesthetic. Not everything aspires to Wagnerian opera or DeMille epic.

In this case, it fits. Their game plan was entirely too small. Just launching one apologetic hour of it on TV on Easter Sunday was a virtual admission that too much had been shrunk.

The opener, which should have been at least two or even three hours, should have announced to one and all "this is a big deal; that's because it's the right cast for the right subject."

Someone with vision should have marched into the offices of Showtime honchos and said "Listen guys, we really need to rethink this show. We need to have more faith in what we've got."

But, alas, it never happened.

So here's MY game plan for watching the thing: DVR'ing it weekly and using the fast forward liberally until each of life's greatest hits shows up and the periods of heedless shrinkage are bypassed.

Starz does it right

On the other hand, let it be known that with the same hourlong weekly format, the folks at Starz seem to have done it right when putting "Gaslit" together. The production team that got it started was the subversive bunch at "Mr. Robot." The stars are Julia Roberts, at 54 a mega-star who seems to work only when she jolly well wants to, playing Martha Mitchell, and Sean Penn, no less, as her husband, Richard Nixon's loyalist and brutalist attorney general during Watergate, whose tolerant amusement of his wife's outrages, became increasingly untenable.

The outrageous female insider is an almost archetypal role in Washington narrative. Among the most famous of them was Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth who famously had a pillow embroidered with the motto "If you can't say anything nice about anybody, come right over here and sit by me."

In that tradition, we're offered a Martha Mitchell who was not going to be happy with the bit between her teeth pulling with the same team as her husband.

Julia Roberts is no fool. She never was.

It's not that she's never made foolish or ill-chosen movies but she certainly hasn't done so often and even when she does, her reasons for them are usually nothing if not cunning.

Carrying on as Martha Mitchell in counterpoint to Penn as John, wearing a half-ton of makeup and costuming seems to me almost obscenely clever career caretaking.

When an actor's rewards have been near-total and his or her fame daunting, he or she is able to do what they choose and whom to do it with.

"Gaslit" is very careful career management for both Roberts and Penn. Sight unseen, it almost seems inevitable that it will make Sunday night TV cheery for a while.