PBS begins ‘Chasing the Moon’
To cite Tom Wolfe’s quotation of Marshall McLuhan, “People don’t read the morning newspaper, they slip into it like a warm bath.” OK, there are fewer of us who read the morning newspaper that way anymore. But other art forms are just as inviting.
PBS documentaries come to mind. Ever since Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” arrived way back in 1990, people have come to expect a certain kind of nonfiction film to provide not just information and education, but an all-enveloping environment — complete with a gift shop, if it’s pledgedrive month.
The three-part “American Experience” documentary miniseries “Chasing the Moon” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) offers viewers more than a glance back at the Apollo program of some 50 years ago. It’s a long, languid meditation on the entire Space Race and the Cold War that inspired it.
“Chasing” opens with what seems like a 10-minute tracking shot of a Saturn V rocket. It’s a belabored and indulgent scene that sets the tone for this meditative effort.
According to PBS, the filmmaker spent five years scouring government and film archives for original material. And he’s hit some pay dirt. We see rare footage of President Kennedy inspecting a Saturn booster at Cape Canaveral scant days before his assassination. We also visit a cocktail lounge in Cocoa Beach and listen to a singer deliver a slightly risque song about her astronaut lover.
“Chasing the Moon” includes insights from television producers who created the legendary imagery, gossip about the emerging news media and space program, and even insights from the son of Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian leader who made the most of Soviet space triumphs.
Beautiful and belabored, this “American Experience” is a little lacking in broad historical perspective, and in historians.
The Space Race was very much a product of a time in the Cold War when Democrats were far more hawkish than Republicans about the Soviet rocket threat and about military spending in general. After Sputnik shocked the world in 1957, Democrats won the Senate in 1958 and the White House in 1960 by painting Republicans, personified by President Eisenhower, as out of touch with the new era that they would soon dub the New Frontier.
Kennedy’s vigor, gungho attitude and impetuous energy inspired him to reach for the moon. It also landed the American military in a quagmire called Vietnam. The very war that “old-fashioned” Eisenhower had resisted for his entire presidency.
These issues might arise if this were a historical documentary and not a soothing three-night soak in a hot tub time machine.
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Contact Kevin McDonough at kevin .tvguy@gmail.com.