The Gift to Be Simple With a Pumpkin-Patch Profundity

“I sucked my thumb as a kid,” the cartoonist Jules Feiffer says in tonight’s installment of the “American Masters” series on PBS. “I did a kids’ strip. I never thought of a kid sucking his thumb.”

But somebody did. The somebody was, as the title of this program puts it, “Good Ol’ Charles Schulz,” and Mr. Feiffer’s small homage perfectly captures the genius of the man behind Linus and the other “Peanuts” characters: He knew that the simple and the obvious were sometimes also the most profound.

Like the new Schulz biography by David Michaelis (an interviewee and consultant here), the program makes illuminating use of panels from a half-century’s worth of “Peanuts” to illustrate the biographical sketch being supplied by friends and family. It’s a savvy approach that makes you realize that his sparse style wasn’t so simple after all, that beneath any given strip may have lurked Mr. Schulz’s real-life loneliness, lost love or

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