MY RECENT CRITICISM OF KEN BURNS isn't specifically about that series, it's about his stuff I've seen in the past and the idea that you can replace READING HISTORY from books and, especially, reading entire primary documents with something as limited and expensive to produce (and so the limits) aimed at a popular audience. IF and that big if is too small, it led viewers to think of the movie as a brief intro and if the movie led them to the primary documents - many of which are easily available for free online (I haven't looked, have Burns of PBS made such available in an easily used form online?) a lot of my criticism would be answered. Certainly it would cost them little to do such a thing, though if they didn't give enough emphasis to, for example, the anti-federalists and the opponents and critics of the revolution and the activities of the oligarchs and enslavers that proved their hypocrisy and hatred of equality and democracy, they shouldn't bother. We've already got that kind of bullshit history everywhere and don't need PBS pushing it any more than they do.
But the problem with even that is that you can lead only a few to viewing and, even those being "information age" People, you can't make them read, it's not going to be effective. I don't know if his self-admittedly flawed magnum opus which I did see all of, The Civil War, had been effective we would not be living through the Republican-fascist, Roberts Court effort to reestablish the Confederacy generally in the exact way that those who wrote and signed onto the Dred Scott decision tried to do in 1857, I don't think that was due to his reliance on the folksy-drawling Confederacy romanticism of Shelby Foote, it was because the ambition to maintain the lies set in motion by those who were following Lewis Powell's road-map to American oligarchy from Hollywood to NYC to DC to Atlanta in those years had the bigger megaphone, including that most dangerous of all venues for such lies, entertainment media.
I think Burns has a habit of relying on celebrity pop historians and writers which doesn't help much. Pop history becomes pop history because it supports existing, established narratives. If his use of easily identified Hollywood actors for reading stuff helps, I don't know but sometimes I have found it distracting and occasionally annoying. I don't recall who pointed out that part of Burns' method is to find appealing characters such as Foote was (to many, I found him unappealing) and to feature them based on that. I think that criticism was true in his case and perhaps in others.
He's hardly the worst of the type, that may have been Frederick Wiseman, whose movies teach nothing and seem to try to teach nothing. I think part of my problem with documentaries in general is that compared to real research into a subject, especially viewing a large range of primary documents, it gives a false sense of having learned about a topic when reading a range of relevant articles in the old World Book Encyclopedia would probably give you more actual knowledge of it and would certainly give you more lasting clues of what to search for online or in a good library. It's the old "I saw the movie" approach as compared to reading the book. When it's fiction, that doesn't matter much. When it's history, you end up with Confederacy romantics and idiots who believed the founders and framers were gods whose ideas and Constitution should regulate our lives and laws in ways that no fundamentalist Baptist or Pentacostalist would ever try to use Scripture for (except to regulate and control OTHER PEOPLES' LIVES). If Burns' series turned into a rejection of Roberts Court "originalism" and "textualism" bullshit it would be useful though I doubt it could be effective for that and still get the NYT media mainstream approval and do anything for eventually, getting PBS's funding restored.
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