• The Queen and I, 8-9:30 p.m. Wednesday, HBO2

• Iran and the West, 9-11 p.m. Monday, National Geographic Channel

• Be Like Others, 8-9:15 p.m. June 24, HBO2

Her husband was billing it as nothing more than a prolonged vacation, but Farah Diba, the queen of Iran, knew it was much more. As she climbed aboard the royal aircraft bound for Egypt, the streets of Tehran were full of demonstrators chanting ''Death to the shah!'' She recalls thinking, ``Is this going to be forever?''

Thirty years later, it feels like it -- for the queen, for Iran, for us. The string of geopolitical firecrackers lit that morning just keeps exploding with growing ferocity -- the two hostage crises, the Iran-Iraq war, the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, Sept. 11. Now we stand locked in confrontation with not just a nearly nuclear Iran, but the entire Muslim world.

The continuing fallout from the Islamic revolution that toppled the shah, ranging from the broadly political to the intimately personal, is the subject of three spellbinding documentaries to be televised during the next week. Watching them makes it depressingly clear what a vast gulf -- of history, of politics, of culture, of elemental perception of human nature -- exists between the two countries, and why American presidents as diverse as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton have found it impossible to bridge.

`IRAN AND THE WEST'

The most ambitious of the three is the National Geographic Channels Iran and the West, airing Monday, which in just 90 minutes of running time deftly sketches three decades of lethal political schism. Fashioning its story from a truly astonishing series of interviews with everybody from Jimmy Carter to former Iranian president Seyed Mohammad Khatami, Iran and the West tells a tale rife with diplomatic duplicity and dysfunction.

Neither side has ever dealt very honestly with the other. Iran's persistent pledges to end its support for terrorism are inevitably followed by another round of kidnappings, assassinations or bombings. The Carter administration botched its own attempts at a peaceful settlement of the 1979 hostage crisis by feeding intelligence to Saddam Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran. Countless promising diplomatic initiatives have been disfigured by domestic politics, with both governments promising more than they could deliver. In the end, the two nations have become so mistrustful that they can't even make common cause for long against mutual enemies like Saddam or the Taliban.

But underlying all the double-dealing, Iran and the West suggests, is a fundamental clash of civilizations that makes the Cold War seem like a simple misunderstanding. Nothing illustrates it like former Iranian president Khatami's explanation of why he was ousted from an earlier government. Iran's religious establishment, he says, was outraged by his claim that ``Islam can coexist with freedom, democracy and the modern world.''

Small wonder, then, that Iran and the West flatly predicts President Obama's recent overture to Iran (''We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist'') will fail. Iran's fundamentalist regime ''rejects liberalism and secularism, principles that govern Western society,'' the show concludes. ``The many dead on both sides have reinforced this bitter divide. It will be very difficult for any new leader to shift the weight of history.''

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