america's best idea
Denise & I finished watching the most recent Ken Burn's documentary last night. With the exception of 'Baseball', I've watched all of his documentaries, and while this wasn't his best effort, it wasn't the worst either. Some parts of it were truly stunning. Other parts felt really forced, as if they needed to find filler to get them close to that two hours per episode. I'm fairly certain that I enjoyed it more than Denise, since she wasn't even sure that she wanted to watch the entire thing (yet she soldiered through it anyway). We both agreed that the 4th episode (of 6) was the best overall. I felt that it told the most cohesive story of the parks, without getting bogged down in historical back story, or irrelevant anecdotes. The cinematography was excellent throughout (although its hard to screw that up considering the subject matter.
I also thoroughly enjoyed the coverage of John Muir and Stephen Mather. Perhaps it was ignorance on my part, but I never knew much more about Muir beyond thinking that he was this redwood tree hugger. While that was true to great extent, he played a huge role in the establishment of Yosemite as a park, as well as the creation of the concept of a national park. He was also a contemporary of Teddy Roosevelt, and greatly influenced him on the creation of additional national parks. Beyond that, I was really impressed by how much Muir traveled purely for leisure. He spent time exploring Alaska, and also traveled through northern Arizona, neither of which is he commonly known to have done. I will admit that for much of the first half of the documentary, we joked that it had turned into a drinking game, where every time the words Muir, Yellowstone or Yosemite were mentioned we should have taken a drink.
I think what impressed me even more was Stephen Mather. Before watching the documentary, I remembered going to Mather Point in Grand Canyon National Park, but other than that, I had no clue who it was named after. I was blown away at how much this guy accomplished. Even before he became the first directory of the National Park Service, he established guidelines and improvements that made it into the organization that it is today.
Beyond that, the show was fairly engrossing. The so-called interviews with subject matter experts felt rather week. In past documentaries, we'd hear from dozens of people. In this one, it was basically the same 6 people over and over again, and very few of them really had anything useful to add that wasn't full of superlatives.
Overall, I don't know that I'd watch the show again. I've been to many of the national parks that were featured (most, unintentionally in the past year), and enjoyed them thoroughly. But I'm probably not the target audience of the show, who was supposed to be wowed into planning a trip to a park. I already visit national parks on a regular basis, and enjoy & treasure them.