TV preview: The Kennedys

The Kennedy clan's lives seem to perfectly embody the American dream - and nightmare.

Their story is a remarkable one, and certainly ripe for a TV adaptation, so it came as little surprise when it was announced that Greg Kinnear, Katie Holmes, Tom Wilkinson and Barry Pepper would be appearing in the enterprise.

The resulting epic uses public events as a background to tell the intimate story of this iconic family.

It is about huge achievements and private failures, about loyalty and love, resentment and betrayal, about people imbued with great gifts and burdened by great flaws, about success of Biblical proportions and tragedy worthy of the Greeks.

It is a story of family loyalty, of lives built on the deaths of siblings, and of sons bending to the will of their dominant father.

Created by Joel Surnow and Stephen Kronish, the Emmy award-winning team behind the groundbreaking series 24, the eight-part mini-series vividly portrays the story of the most influential family in the world.

The series recreates the political crisis that John F Kennedy dealt with in the early days of his presidency including the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Civil Rights Movement. Every twist and turn of this dynamic family's extraordinary story is told up to and including the assassinations of JFK and Bobby Kennedy.

Fifty years since Jack Kennedy's inauguration as President, the story of the most fabled political family in American history still exerts a powerful fascination.

Episode one begins on the eve of the 1960 Presidential election, when John F Kennedy is poised to become the youngest man ever elected to office. While he and a heavily pregnant Jackie are forefront in the media spotlight, behind the scenes, Kennedy family patriarch Joseph P Kennedy Sr, one of America's richest men, works furiously to ensure his son's victory over Richard Nixon.

Episode two series follows immediately afterwards at 9.45pm. Congressman Jack Kennedy's progression to Washington appears unstoppable.

However, when Jacqueline's mother's prophecy that Jack will never be faithful seems true, Joe Sr tries to solve the problem the only way he knows how.