THIS is the big one.
I have spent the better part of my adult life watching TV for a living, and I have never experienced anything more powerful than this.
“The War,” the 14-hour documentary miniseries about World War II from epic-filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is this fall’s main event.
It is so rewarding and so important that it’s a shame that PBS has chosen to roll it out – two hours each on four consecutive evenings starting Sunday and three consecutive nights the following week – in the midst of all the new entertainment programs premiering on the other networks.
I wish I could persuade everyone reading this review that they should sweep away all their plans for sampling the new shows on those evenings in favor of “The War,” but I’ll settle for persuading just some of you.
I can assure you that you have never seen anything like this before, even though it might seem as if World War II has been covered from every possible angle in the hundreds of other documentaries seen on TV over the years.
This one succeeds at encompassing the entire scope of the Second World War by telling its story from the point of view of the Americans from all walks of life who went abroad to fight it, and the ones who participated in the war effort at home.
Even if you have watched a thousand World War II documentaries, you have never heard stories about the war like the ones told here.
More than any other treatment of the war, this one really gets to the central issue – the killing, and how ordinary people did it. When you hear the stories told by some who were there and did some of the killing, you will not believe your ears.
Burns and Novick place every interview in the context of the war and its era – the vanished world of the 1940s.
It is a world that normally would only be recognizable to those old enough to have been alive then. But the marriage of imagery and music – anchored by the narration of Keith David – is so vivid and immediate that watching this documentary often feels like you’re experiencing the great war as it is actually taking place.
And when you come to the end of its 14 hours – as I did – the feeling is something akin to the disorientation the veterans must have felt when they came home.
It’s like you’ve been through something unique and awful that has changed you forever.
“The War”
Sunday night at 8 on WNET/13