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The PBS series P.O.V. begins its fifteenth season on June 25 by airing a documentary with all the characteristics that viewers of the program have come to expect: an intimate story told with great care that will simultaneously piss off and inspire plenty of people. And that's why "The Smith Family" is worthy of our time. P.O.V. proves reality television can be stimulating even without the disbursement of valuable prizes.

"The Smith Family" opens with Kim Smith recounting her engagement and marriage to Steve, a good-looking, tan, fair-haired Air Force pilot. The visuals are of home movies and pictures of young lovers growing into a family. It's an idyllic life, a Mormon couple with two kids, a beautiful home in Salt Lake City, close-knit family, status. But Kim also tells us she felt a wall had grown between her and Steve, with visuals of Steve being aloof and distant. He eventually tells Kim, on their ninth anniversary, of his infidelity with men. We pick up the Smith story on Christmas 1999. Forty-two-year-old Steve has AIDS, Kim is HIV-positive, and an entire family is forced to respond.

Director/producer Tasha Oldham doesn't wag a finger of shame or gloss over Steve's choices and Kim's decision to keep the family together. Oldham allows the members of the Smith family to speak for themselves, to question their own morality, and contemplate mortality.

Oldham and editors Janet Swanson and Jeff Werner skillfully mix the documentary with nonsaccharine scenes of love and grace, fear and uncertainty, anger and betrayal. For example, we see the Smiths, with extended family, eating breakfast on a weekend morning. Kim's father, Don, is asked to give the prayer for the meal. Oldham then cuts to Don talking about what he felt the moment he found out about Steve's infidelities.

"I would've been very delighted to hit Steve across the side of the head with a shovel," he says, with little remorse.

"The Smith Family" is not simply a story about infidelity, homosexuality, and AIDS. It is an examination of tensions within a family. One such tension is over religion, especially a belief system that holds its members to a strict covenant with implications in the afterlife. Oldham also shows us Kim stressing about the price of medicine and under-estimated hospital bills; Steve expressing an unfathomable guilt for giving the disease to his wife; the couple's teenage children discussing life without their parents, with one child being sent away on a Mormon mission to Mexico. But the most heartbreaking scenes are the ones where Kim desperately wishes for a life she can't have while she is working out the only life she does have.

"I'm still in the process of forgiving him for what could have been," Kim tells the audience.

This is an emotionally powerful story, and I had to walk a fine line in order not to manipulate the audience one way or the other," Oldham says about her documentary in a press release from P.O.V. "I felt it was important for the Smiths to tell their own story, and to let the audience have its own reaction. The heart of the story is Kim's decision, which I found extraordinary, to keep the family together."

This is where P.O.V. documentaries depart from the ones done on commercial networks and cable. There are no cutaways to a network star nodding approvingly as Kim talks or crinkling his face in shock at Steve's past. No fast-paced cuts. No comments from "experts" who don't have a stake in the family.

A similar style of storytelling is also seen in Slawomir Grunberg's "Fenceline: A Company Town Divided" (air date: July 23). Odd that a Polish immigrant is able to capture race, class, environmental politics, and Southern traditions, both good and bad, where many American film-makers struggle.

"Fenceline" is the story of Norco, Louisiana, located forty miles from New Orleans and home to a Shell refinery. It's a micro-level look at the effects of petrochemical plants that run along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. It's a micro-level look at America.

Grunberg follows the stories of white families who have made their lives at the plant for generations, and black families who live in the Diamond community, a four-block area along the fenceline of the plant. Folks in Diamond, which is 100 percent black, suffer higher incidents of asthma and cancer, and only one person from the neighborhood is employed at the plant. The white citizens of Norco have prospered under Shell. They, like so many other whites in America, neglect to see how their financial gains have affected the health of their black neighbors.

In the black community, Margie Richard, a retired schoolteacher, is fighting Shell, with the aid of a white chemist and national environmental groups. She wants the company to move the community to a cleaner neighborhood and create a "green belt" between the plant and the rest of Norco.

A great scene occurs early in "Fenceline" when Sal Digirolamo, a Shell retiree, walks down his street and points at the homes of friends, most in their seventies and eighties. Richard walks down her street and points at the homes of people who died of cancer or suffer from asthma and other bronchial ailments.

Both "The Smith Family" and "Fenceline" cover topics that, in the wrong hands, could be exploited for the type of cheap theatrics that plague television documentaries: manipulative music, unusual camera angles, and choppy editing. If you don't believe me, then look at what's being passed off as documentary material. Sorry, HBO, but G-String Divas would be more interesting if the makers turned their cameras on viewers to understand why they watch. Bill Curtis s crime docs on A&E are more fun than thought-provoking. How many ways can we feature Nazis, the Civil War, and World War II? Can we find new angles to show apes preening and lions dropping gazelles?

"The Smith Family" and "Fenceline" aren't raw films in technique, but raw emotion is shown in both. Real people speak to us. Sometimes it is painful, confusing, and distressful to watch. Shouldn't Kim have kicked Steve to the curb? Shouldn't the white folks of Norco have been more cognizant of their black neighbors? We ask these questions, and we may not get the answers we want. But, in the end, we do see topics and people that commercial television is either incapable of showing or deems unworthy of airtime.

Fred McKissack Jr. is Associate Editor of The Progressive.

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