In 1978, hot on the heels of the successful miniseries Roots, NBC broadcast Holocaust, a four-part saga that won Emmy Awards and earned a 50 per cent market share, something unheard of today.

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of its television debut, the 71/2-hour series is now available on DVD for the first time on three discs. Holocaust follows the stories of two Berlin families caught in the saga of the Holocaust.

It begins with the marriage of Karl Weiss, a Jewish artist played by James Woods, to Inga Helms, a Catholic German played by the burgeoning Meryl Streep.

It also follows the rise of the fictitious Erik Dorf (Michael Moriarty), a Nazi civil servant who, guided by his wife’s ambition, rises to be Reinhard Heydrich’s second-in-command and a key player in the execution of the Final Solution.

Through Dorf, the story follows the evolution of the Holocaust from Kristallnacht and the Wannsee Conference (Heydrich was the chair of the conference) to the use of gas showers and crematoria at Auschwitz.

The members of the Weiss family, (Dr. Josef Weiss, his wife Berta, brother Moses and children Karl, Rudi and Anna) meanwhile suffer the full range of the Holocaust. Josef, Moses and Berta are sent to the Warsaw Ghetto, where Moses participates in the Ghetto Uprising after Josef and Berta are sent to Auschwitz. Karl is sent to the model camp in Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz, Anna suffers a nervous breakdown after she is raped by Brownshirts and is sent to a treatment centre, where she is killed. Only Rudi (Joseph Bottoms) manages to escape Berlin and joins the resistance in Ukraine, where he witnesses – and narrowly escapes – the massacre at Babi Yar.

Directed by Marvin Chomsky (who also did Roots), Holocaust was not without criticism. Author and human rights activist Elie Wiesel called it “untrue and offensive.” Others criticized NBC for trivializing and making money from the tragedy.

The very nature of television probably did mute the harsh reality. Certainly, watching it now for the first time since I was 12, it does seem that the Warsaw Ghetto is rather clean and tidy, devoid of starving and dead bodies, unlike, say, the ghettos of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.

Even Auschwitz seems relatively sedate. The women in Holocaust all seem to have full heads of hair as they are led to the showers.

But that TV limitation aside (and it is brave enough to show the execution of naked men at Babi Yar, something networks would probably shy away from these days), Holocaust is very well done.

It takes its time building up the characters and then marches to its drastic conclusion. Dorf’s transformation from kind lawyer to Holocaust henchman is believable.

It’s certainly not as stark and foreboding as Schindler’s List, but that’s an unfair comparison.

In hindsight, for a 1978 miniseries, it’s well ahead of its time. And, arguably, American network television has not run anything quite as powerful as Holocaust since.