A 17-member civilian production crew spent six months and sailed 57,000 miles aboard a US Navy aircraft carrier to produce a stunning 10-part documentary series for PBS.
Titled “Carrier,” this series from Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions might be the most candid look at everyday life on board a U.S. warship in wartime that has ever been filmed.
It premieres Sunday with the first two episodes (9 p.m. on WNET/13 and 11:30 p.m. on WLIW/21), after which two episodes will be seen every night through next Thursday.
Produced on the nuclear-powered U.S.S. Nimitz, “Carrier” documents the ship’s deployment from May to November 2005, from Coronado, Calif., and back, including a stop in the Persian Gulf, where the ship served as the staging platform for 1,167 bombing missions.
The ship is one of the largest of its kind – a virtual small town 23 stories high, 252 feet wide and 1,092 feet long, and inhabited by 5,500 male and female personnel.
Their average age: 19½ – which sometimes makes the ship seem like the world’s largest floating high school, according to some of the enlisted personnel in the series.
“It was unbelievably interesting and unbelievably difficult,” said series co-creator Maro Chermayeff, who last left her New York City home for six months when she worked on the reality series “Frontier House” for PBS.
She said it took several years to persuade Navy officials to OK the project.
Eventually, the producers’ persistence earned them the respect of the Navy brass and their approval. “We just never took no for an answer,” Chermayeff said, “which we later found out was kind of the Navy way.”
By her estimate, her crew was free to roam through 95 percent of the ship. One exception was the area containing the ship’s nuclear reactor. Also classified: Rooms where intelligence data is analyzed.
The ship’s commander, Capt. Ted Branch, describes the Nimitz as one huge weapons system whose thousands of personnel all have a role to play in the ship’s central mission, which is to maintain, arm and launch a fleet of fighter jets and bring them back safely.
Serving on the Nimitz can feel like living “beneath the runway of a major airport,” says one sailor.
For Chermayeff, the voyage was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, especially when the Nimitz arrived in the Persian Gulf (which is covered in Episodes 5, 6 and 7).
“Carrier”