The publicity materials for the History Channel’s new special on George Washington (airing Monday night at 9 p.m.) declare him to be “America’s First Action Hero.” The slogan is accompanied by a comic-book drawing of a young, smiling George Washington in front of a starburst background.

The good news about “Washington: The Warrior” is that the film is neither as hagiographic nor as cartoonish as the posters suggest. Also, the two-hour show avoids the revisionist impulse that has led a number of historians to engage in a form of “gotcha” history with the Founding Fathers. The show, which focuses on Washington’s years as a military commander, concludes not with his ascent to the presidency in 1789 or his death in 1799, but with the Battle of Yorktown and its aftermath. The show, which mixes dramatized scenes from Washington’s life with interviews with historians and biographers of the first president, begins by retelling his experiences at Yorktown. The show then quickly segues to his early experiences in the Ohio territories in the 1750s, where a young Washington was sent as an emissary on a diplomatic mission that earned him a quick promotion and some renown.

This then led to a second mission into the French-controlled Ohio territory that turned out rather less well than the first. The misadventure begins, in fact, with a diplomatic incident that the French would later dub an “assassination,” when Washington launched a sneak attack on what turned out to be a diplomatic mission not unlike the one he had recently undertaken himself. The leader of the French troop was killed under disputed circumstances, and Washington and his men were subsequently counterattacked and forced to defend a poorly conceived makeshift fortification. The result was a rout that led to Washington’s resignation.

The History Channel documentary proceeds in this vein through 1760s and 1770s, neatly matching victory with setback in a pattern that can seem formulaic at times – one cringes at the opening voice over that tells us that “for General George Washington, those six years (1775-81) must have seemed like forever” or that “the burdens Washington carried were magnified by an inner struggle with dark uncertainties.”

Luckily, the story of Washington’s military career is a good one and worth telling. The show seems at times to be saved by the strength of its source material, despite the script’s periodic descents into the maudlin.

In addition to helping to spark the French and Indian War with his misadventure in the Ohio territory, we learn that Washington lost more battles than he won in the war of independence. He made serious miscalculations as a military commander; the documentary tells us that it took the persuasion of his French allies to convince him to fight the Battle of Yorktown at all.That decision won the war, although as historian Joseph Ellis points out in an interview, Yorktown was less a natural cul mination of an unremittingly successful military campaign than a surprise blow that sends an opponent to the canvas in an instant.

It is impossible to tell stories about one of the country’s founders without suggesting that in some way he came to personify one of the civic virtues we hold dear. In “Washington: The Warrior” it is said of the man who would become our first president that he “led from the front. “The documentary depicts critical moments in his life and the course of his military career in which he put himself in harm’s way to win a battle or to secure a retreat. Washington “led from the front” in other ways, too. For example, by resisting the obvious temptation – and, the documentary argues, the opportunity – to become a Napoleon even before Napoleon did. And as Mr. Ellis notes, Washington became “an unusual man who comes to embody the revolution but is willing to walk away from power.”

One might rather say that in showing his willingness to walk away from power, Washington made it possible for the American Revolution to realize its promise, rather than descend into the power grab that nearly every other revolution before or since has succumbed to. Toward the end of the documentary,Washington is shown putting down an officer’s putsch in the delicate post-Yorktown period before retiring to Mount Vernon (whence he would be called again in a political capacity).

“He was a man,” the voice-over tells us near the end, “who preferred liberty to power and justice to glory.” This too flirts with over sentimentalizing him,yet it is not far from true.Washington was not above seeking glory, but he didn’t sacrifice his country in pursuit of it. Through the highs and lows, the victories and the routs, one is left most of all with a sense of wonder that Washington succeeded at all.

The American Revolution was a remarkable, not to say miraculous, thing. And somehow, Washington stood at the center of it. “Washington: The Warrior” will reveal no secrets as to how precisely that came to pass, but in its best moments, it does convey a sense of the wondrousness of the fact that it happened at all. One could do worse on Memorial Day than that.