Nation's founding forms a complex picture

Ken Burns helps lead the charge with in-depth 'American Revolution' on PBS.

- ROBERT LLOYD TELEVISION CRITIC

Back in 1990, Ken Burns made his reputation with "The Civil War," a sprawling, multipart documentary that caused a sensation, set a standard and sealed the style he's applied to practically everything he's done since measured and hypnotic (some would say slow), with photos and paintings scanned for revealing detail, actors reading primary documents and more likely than not, the voice of narrator Peter Coy Revolution," ote guiding you through.

With the six-part "The American which premiered Sunday, and continues nightly through Friday on PBS, Burns' longtime home, he has created a prequel to that series, looking at a war for independence that was also a civil war and in which enslaved Black Americans and Indigenous peoples played a part. Burns has crossed this subject before, with films dedicated to Thomas Jefferson (1997) and Benjamin Franklin (2022), not to mention series on Vietnam and World War II. But this is foundational stuff for a filmmaker specializing in American figures, institutions and events the Dust Bowl, Prohibition, women's suffrage, baseball, the buffalo, Muhammad Ali, the Central Park Five, Frank Lloyd Wright, the National Parks and Mark Twain. In the history class of my mind, his films comprise the syllabus.

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