Ten percent of us are unemployed and Wall St. still wants us to bend over and pretend to enjoy what they've done to us...the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue endlessly...left wing and right wing extremists fight like school yard bullies while the American people suffer. What the heck happened to this country? Europeans get a month of vacation every year, while we are all chained to our laptops 24-7 and will probably die at our desks since nobody can retire with 401K accounts shrunk to the size of postage stamps. Which we also can no longer afford, what are they like a dollar apiece now?Almost 50 years ago JFK vowed to put an American on the moon, and his dream came true. Now hundreds of NASA workers face layoffs as the Shuttle program shuts down and the fate of the space program, my personal greatest source of American pride, seems murky. The land of the brave and home of the free will have to hitch a ride to the International Space Station with the Russians, we won't even have our own space ships anymore.
Into the midst of this national mid-life crises, comes "America: The Story of Us", premiering Sunday April 25th at 9pm on the History channel. It's a 12 part series covering the story of how America invented itself, and will offer a lovely break from the Sturm and Drang of the past few years. Sunday night's premier episode (The Rebels) may offer inspiration from America's revolutionary days, when the first Americans fought for their freedom under dire circumstances that would make us all look like a bunch of over grown crybabies today.
Check out the promo below, and you'll see something to look forward to. Even though we've hit hard times as a nation, we still have the best cable TV programming in the whole wide world. Thank you History Channel!
I hope this is good and serious and not facile and dumbed-down like Discovery Channel's presentation of the recent "Life" doc. There is a tendency these days to make everything ironic in the attempt to render it entertaining to the majority, and it's ruining a lot of non-fiction programming. I'm hoping this is a bracing display of intelligent content! Thanks for writing about it, Jane!
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more. "Life" was very disappointing. Pretty pictures and very little substance. I usually like to watch these documentaries to learn something I didn't already know, that certainly didn't happen with "Life". Fingers crossed that "America" will be a bit more nuanced.
ReplyDeleteThe other recent trend with documentaries I don't like is the tendency to add raucous, almost metal rock to any action scene. It's a pitiful and doomed attempt to lure young male viewers away from YouTube.