American Masters on PBS

This portrait of Norman Rockwell profiles the artist (1894-1978) whose reassuring but surprisingly complex scenes of American life graced some 360 Saturday Evening Post covers. Indeed, before he began facing social issues head-on in the 1960s (most famously, in a painting of a black girl being escorted to school by Federal marshals), Rockwell could fairly be called (and is here) a propagandist for the American dream. And it's unlikely that he would have disagreed. “I paint life as I would like it to be,” he once said.