Yes, America, PBS's 'The Vietnam War' is required viewing -- all 18 hours of it
By Hank Stuever TV critic September 14 at 9:53 AM
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s astounding and sobering 10-episode PBS documentary “The Vietnam War” (airing Sunday through Sept. 28 on PBS stations) took a decade to research, film, edit and ultimately perfect. It clocks in at 18 hours — a length as daunting as its subject, yet worth every single minute of your time. I’ll go so far as to call it required viewing, before you watch anything else on TV that will come (and probably go) this fall season, especially all those new fictional dramas that celebrate special-ops teams quietly taking out America’s terrorist enemies with little muss and no fuss.
As an account of both the war and its political and cultural legacies, “The Vietnam War” is about as complete and evenhanded as it could possibly get, which, of course, means it won’t please everyone. There’s also the ongoing problem of our corroded attention spans and increasing inability to separate fact from opinions or lies. This makes “The Vietnam War” even more valuable right now. Do your best to stay with it — an episode here, another episode later — and open both your heart and your mind. This is the real stuff.
Even now, as we still elect leaders who are old enough to need to explain their whereabouts in the Vietnam years (as a young man, President Trump reportedly received multiple deferments, including one for bone spurs in one of his feet), the subject remains an argumentative, open fissure in American society — a “war begun in secrecy [in the 1940s],” intones the film’s narrator, Peter Coyote. “It ended 30 years later in failure, witnessed by the entire world.” The nation’s relationship to the war is “like living in a family with an alcoholic father,” observes Marine veteran Karl Marlantes.
Although our preferred means for ripping into one another these days lean heavily on the Civil War (the subject of Burns’s 1990 documentary, which remains his defining masterpiece), a great deal of our national anxiety in 2017 follows a straight line from the 1960s and early ’70s. Burns and Novick’s film doesn’t come out and say so in a blunt way, but you’d be a fool not to pick up on the echoes.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/yes-america-pbss-the-vietnam-war-is-required-viewing--all-18-hours-of-it/2017/09/14/c89bd07a-94be-11e7-89fa-bb822a46da5b_story.html
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