Ready for War? PBS Hopes So

Jeff Bercovici is on vacation. Guest blogger Sean Elder submits:

The Nielsen ratings aren't in yet on the first installment of Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's PBS series, The War, but the critics have already spoken. Typical reactions include that of the New Yorker's Nancy Franklin who wrote in the Sept. 24 issue, "They've taken a subject that is inexhaustible and made it merely exhausting," and Virginia Heffernan's review in the Sunday New York Times, which sniffed at the American-centric nature of the whole thing.
"World War II didn't happen just to us," she wrote. Even New York magazine's John Leonard, who is old enough to remember WWII, said there is "very little new and nothing provocative" therein.

The Burns backlash has been building for years, and may have culminated with his Jazz series (2001), which had lots of people who had never heard Sidney Bechet suddenly complaining he had gotten short shrift. Ironically, his latest series contains few of the filmmaker's usual tropes. "The War is surprisingly short on talking-head dogmatists, largely bereft of celebrity actors reading the mail of the blameless dead, and altogether innocent of rinky-dink piano-roll music," Leonard allowed. But like his peers, he felt that it had all been said before.

So I tuned in last night with something less than high-expectations. I had grown up hearing stories from my father, who as a Marine saw action in the Solomon Islands, and like Tony Soprano, I have watched more than my share of The Hitler Channel. But I found many of the photos and footage of familiar battles amazing - and much of it was news to my wife.

PBS may be hoping for a less jaded audience than that of TV critics, but it's also worth remembering: there are still some people in the country who don't have cable! And they get PBS for free, and may learn aspects of WWII history the rest of us take for granted, from the Japanese forced death march in Bataan, to the US's relocation camps for Japanese-Americans in the west. Or Guadalcanal, where green Marines encountered for the first time the cruelty of Japanese soldiers, and then retaliated by taking no prisoners.

Remember the impact that the Roots miniseries had in 1977? I thought everyone knew about the abuses of American slavers but it was literally news to many who watched. I was working in a sandwich shop with a very white guy from New Jersey then who was blown away by what he saw.

"I'm not saying I wish I was black," he told me, "but watching this show really makes me feel not so good about being white."

Such is the impact of broadcast TV.

by Sean Elder