Ken Burns took his time to make ‘Vietnam War’
The following are highlights from the Television Critics Association’s summer preview of upcoming shows.
Ken Burns is BEVERLY HILLS go-ing back to The Vietnam War. The question is, will America want to go back with him?
Let’s just say he hopes we will, because he says there is much to be learned.
“Human nature never changes, and Vietnam, particularly because we live in this stew of anger and recrimination ... helps us understand the present moment,” Burns told the Television Critics Association Sunday.
Directed by Burns and Lynn Novick, and debuting Sept. 17,
Vietnam will air in 10 parts over 18 hours, spread over two weeks. The film features more than 80 witnesses from all sides of the war’s massive social divide: soldiers and anti-war protesters, Americans and Vietnamese.
And as with most of Burns’ and Novick’s films, most of the people interviewed will be unknown to you before you see the film.
Burns says there’s no agenda in the film, other than to use those perspectives to try to get at the truth, something he says has rare- ly been done with Vietnam. By doing so, he hopes he might “take the fuel rods” out of the division the war sparked and rid us of the “toxicity” he thinks we’ve inherited from the conflict.
Burns and Novick spent 10 years making this film — something he could not have done, he said, anywhere but PBS. – Robert Bianco
PBS’ FUNDING IS AT RISK PBS’ battle for funding continues in the uncertain Trump era.
With federal budget plans still uncertain, PBS President Paula Kerger again made the case for the future of public broadcasting.
While “we have longstanding support from leaders from both chambers on both sides of the aisle,” she said Sunday, “I have to assume, as all of us in public media have to assume, that anything can happen.”
As Congress debates funding (steady at $450 million, with a 2-to-1 split between TV and radio), Kerger says PBS officials don’t assume that all members of Congress understand the broadcaster’s mission.
“Very significant decisions have to made about what gets funded, and I hope that they un- derstand the consequence of any significant cut in funding.”
Kerger reiterated that “most funding goes to local stations, not PBS national programming,” and for stations in rural areas, the funding represents as much as 50% of their budgets. – Gary Levin
CURRY RETURNS TO SCREENS Sometime next year, you’ll meet Ann Curry again.
The former Today anchor, who left the show in 2012, is returning to TV as host of new PBS series
We’ll Meet Again. The six-part series, due January, explores dramatic historic events through the eyes of people who went through them and who now want to reunite with someone who helped them survive.
The stories range from a Japanese-American woman who wants to thank a classmate who stood by her when she was interned in 1942 to a Vietnam War baby who wants to find her American father. – Robert Bianco