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If you haven't set your TiVo for this one yet, you're nuts. And yes, for the record, I think this may be the moment for which Spike Lee was born.

...heartbreak, not fury, is the dominant emotion of Lee's $2 million documentary, which will premiere in two parts on Aug. 21 and 22, and then air in its entirety on Aug. 29, the anniversary of Katrina's landfall. Lee is older and wiser than the man who made "Do the Right Thing," and the result is arguably the most essential work of his 20-year career. Act I covers the storm's arrival; Act II chronicles the failure of the emergency response; Act III follows an abandoned community coming to grips with all that it lost, and Act IV addresses the halting, haphazard effort to begin again. But images and ideas echo through each act like a fugue. Lee's voice is rarely heard; he lets Terence Blanchard's thundering brass score, dizzy with grief, do the speaking for him. (Blanchard, who has now collaborated with Lee 13 times, is a New Orleans native. In one of the film's most wrenching scenes, Blanchard visits the wreckage of his boyhood home with his aging mother.) Most of Katrina's victims were black, but Lee hasn't made a racial polemic. Some viewers will be surprised to find that Lee views the tragedy as a national betrayal rooted in class, not skin color. To him, what the victimized share most is that they had very little to begin with and were left with nothing.