The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened in 1870, and this Great Museums TV production made for public television treats it as a single encyclopedic object, moving gallery by gallery through what it holds rather than staging a plot. The camera lingers in the Egyptian Wing, where the relocated Temple of Dendur sits reassembled stone by stone, then moves through galleries of Greek and Roman sculpture, European paintings with works by Rembrandt and Vermeer, and rooms of modern and contemporary art including Pollock and Warhol. Decorative arts and furniture get their own stretch, a reminder that the collection covers craft as much as fine art. The film also shows the museum's public-facing side: docents leading tours, lecture halls, and workshop spaces where visitors go for context rather than just viewing. There is no central argument here, just an inventory delivered with the pacing of a walkthrough, letting the range of the collection, from ancient Nubia to twentieth-century New York, make its own case for what an encyclopedic museum is for.