The timing could not be better on Jimmy Carter, the PBS biography of the 39th president of the United States. And not just for the reason you might think - that he won the Nobel Peace Prize last month.

The great narrative driving this wise presidential portrait is that of redemption, of a public man scorned by the voters and mocked by the media who followed his private moral compass on a journey not just back to respectability but to worldwide acclaim for his commitment to human rights and peace. That journey begins in November 1980 in the wake of a devastating defeat for Democrats much like the one that happened last week - a period when all seemed lost for Carter. There is a profound lesson here about life after defeat that is too seldom told in our winning-is-everything culture.

The first image we see in Jimmy Carter is Carter's Georgia hometown of Plains in the rain on the gray and gloomy day when he and his wife, Rosalynn, and their daughter, Amy, returned from Washington in utter defeat after handing over the White House to Ronald Reagan.

In voiceover, we hear a part of Carter's concession speech on the night of his November defeat: "I promised you four years ago that I would never lie to you. So, I can't stand here tonight and say it doesn't hurt."

As we look at a montage of the presidential helicopter descending into Plains, barren peanut fields muddied by the winter rain and the Carters walking through a gathering darkness toward their home and the start of private life, the narration says, "On January 20th, 1981, after one of the most humiliating defeats in American political history, President Jimmy Carter returned home to Plains, Georgia, to what he called a 'new, unwanted and potentially empty life.'"

The screen then fills with Rosalynn Carter today recalling that time of their lives in an interview: "He was really better about it than I was when we came home, because I was so depressed about it, and he was always trying to prop me up."

That's the valley of darkness out of which the Carters will have to climb as the film develops, and it is so skillfully established that you can't help but want to stick around and see how they managed to do it. The first few minutes of Jimmy Carter are a near-perfect fusion of image and words, and there isn't a stretch in the three hours of film that doesn't feel carefully edited.

Writer and co-producer Adriana Bosch has done outstanding political biography for the American Experience series with the Rockefellers, Ulysses S. Grant and Reagan, but this is her most eloquent work.

One of the secrets of its success - and maybe this is because you have a woman producing it - is the way Bosch gained access to and then showcased Rosalynn Carter. The film is titled Jimmy Carter, but it could just as aptly be called The Carters. Bosch conceives of them as a team and develops that theme throughout the film. The payoff for the viewer is the insight and testimony we get from Rosalynn as to what their formative years were really like. This isn't Parson Weems making it all cherry trees, truth telling and virtue rewarded.

The pictures are often so good as to be iconic. There's one of Jimmy as a boy wearing a straw hat and carrying a fishing pole that could have been a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. There's another of him as a young man in crisp khakis that screams Mr. Roberts. The still photographs of Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis that brought his presidency to its knees define anguish.

The "expert" talking heads are as good as or better than the ones Ken Burns brings to PBS. Former Carter speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg is the best of a very bright crew.

"What he had was a moral ideology. The issues where he proved successful - peace in the Middle East, the human rights crusade- those were issues where his moral ideology guided him," Hertzberg says, pinpointing how the private and public intersect in Carter.

Unlike Burns, who hammers viewers over the head with his main themes, Bosch is more subtle but no less effective in connecting the dots in Carter's life. She shows his incredible doggedness, from the way he went about getting into the Naval Academy through extra coursework and exercise as a teen-ager to his tireless pursuit of a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978.

But she also gives us the obsessive, self-righteous, micro-managing, angry and depressed Carter who seemed paralyzed near the end of his presidency when all that drive and determination came up empty in solving the problems of staggering inflation at home and an embassy held hostage in Iran.

The calculating Carter is here, too.

"He offered us a biography we wanted to hear: a farmer, Plains, Main Street values. It was the right message at the right time," historian Douglas Brinkley says, explaining how Carter's emphasis on moral integrity during his 1976 presidential campaign was designed in direct response to the way presidents had lied to us about Watergate and Vietnam.

Brinkley might be right about Carter's commitment to moral integrity being manufactured by image-makers in 1976. But the former president made it a reality in his life after leaving the White House on that dark day of Jan. 20, 1981.

Tonight's TV

What: Jimmy Carter

When: Tonight and tomorrow at 9.

Where: MPT (Channels 22 and 67).

In brief: No one does presidents like American Experience.