PBS' Let's Get Married is exactly the kind of below-the-hypeline, public-affairs program likely to be overlooked on a Thursday night during November "sweeps" when every channel on the tube is doing its best to entertain you. Set the VCR if you must see commercial TV tonight, but don't ignore this provocative report from Frontline, the series currently doing the best in-depth journalism on television.

Let's Get Married starts out looking as though it is going to be an examination of the modern marriage movement - an amalgam of Christian activists, political conservatives and intellectuals who begin with the fact that one-third of all households in the United States are now single-parent - and come to the conclusion that what America needs is a society-wide rededication to couples getting married and staying that way. Think Newsweek doing a cover story on a controversial social movement.

We start in Chattanooga, Tenn., with a made-for-television marriage that features audience members of a local morning show selecting a couple and then planning their wedding day and honeymoon through a series of votes. The couple gets the wedding and honeymoon for free - as long as the bride and groom agree to abstain from sex before marriage and to participate in marriage education as decreed by the modern marriage movement group behind the event.

Then, it's off to Oklahoma, where Frank Keating, the conservative governor, has embraced the marriage movement with educational programs expected to cost the state $10 million this year. They range from Christian family therapists offering voluntary marriage workshops to welfare recipients being forced to take classes in "relationship skills" as a condition of receiving aid. We meet one of those recipients, a 36-year-old mother of four who has been married and divorced twice. There are almost as many divorces in Oklahoma each year as there are marriages - 20,000 - we are told.

Keating explains his commitment to the movement by saying, "I asked Oklahoma State University and Oklahoma University to examine the question of why Oklahoma was poor. And they came back with something quite extraordinary. ... They said, 'You have too much divorce, too many out-of-wedlock births, too much drug abuse and violence.' The issue of divorce was paramount to economists."

But just as you start to think you know where Let's Get Married is headed journalistically and politically, the correspondent behind the voice that has been reporting the story identifies himself.

"I'm Alex Kotlowitz," he says. "For 15 years, I've written about families from Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. Unlike Oklahoma, the trouble here is not too many marriages, but too few. In this neighborhood, only one out of 10 children are born to married parents. As we take apart the old structures of public housing and welfare, what about the fate of the family?"

And, suddenly, what looked predictable is anything but. Instead of just reporting on the movement and pigeonholing it by the conservative voices that have been among its loudest, you get a thoughtful analysis of the issues and history behind it from Kotlowitz, author of the acclaimed There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America. You also get an informed discussion of how other peoples' feelings about marriage can affect your quality of life.

"During my reporting, I became convinced that marriage, this most private of institutions, has very public consequences," Kotlowitz says. "And yet, we have such a tough time talking about it. Why is that?"

How tough?

As Kotlowitz tells viewers that Republican President George W. Bush wants to spend $300 million on programs like the ones Keating started in Oklahoma, he also explains that Democratic President Lyndon Johnson wanted to do much the same. And Johnson, Kotlowitz tells us, got the idea from a 1965 report on the state of the African-American family written by another liberal Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. That report created a firestorm of controversy in part for expressing concern "that a third of black children lived with only one parent," according to Kotlowitz.

And remember what happened to Republican Vice President Dan Quayle in 1992 for raising the issue of children born out of wedlock in connection with the television character Murphy Brown?

Let's Get Married deserves praise not just for exploring the relationship between culturally embedded attitudes toward marriage and huge social problems that we have been unable to solve for more than 40 years, but for doing so in a context that makes simple-minded conservative-liberal, Republican-Democratic and black-white distinctions all but impossible.

It is only an hour on a Thursday night in November when it's likely to be dwarfed by the competition. But, maybe, it's the place where a reasoned and informed national discussion can finally begin.

Let's Get Married

When: Tonight at 9

Where: MPT (Channels 22 and 67)

In brief: A provocative look at rethinking the values of marriage and family.