Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The American Prospect

Through a lens, starkly: for U.S. networks that think documentaries are a snore, it''s time to wake up and watch the gripping work of Brits Norma Percy and Brian Lapping.

Article Excerpt
TO HEAR AMERICAN TELEVISION NETworks talk about documentaries--well, there's a self-canceling sentence. If they did talk about documentaries, they'd say that they're like bomb threats: they clear the room. Those eye-glazing, ad-killing relics of a stodgier age might be good for awards, but they're bad for thrills and therefore bad for business. It's supposed to be axiomatic that today's twitchy audiences--at least the folks who aren't yet drawing Social Security checks--won't sit still long enough to let documentaries set the scene, juxtapose divergent memories, let the story unfold. People want drama, and docs aren't dramatic, right? Pass the remote.

If the networks were committed to unearthing significant truth, they'd not only feel obliged to air documentaries but would look for ways to make them watchable without dumbing them down--as Ken Burns' best work has done on public television. In his 1990 Civil War series, for example, Burns showed that you can produce high drama using still photos, talking heads and voice-over readings from musty documents. The notion that documentaries can't be dramatic bites the dust when you look at the work compiled in Britain over the last 25 years by the journalistic team of Norma Percy and Brian Lapping. (Percy is the producer, Lapping the executive producer.) Their multipart series on, among other subjects, Watergate, the breakup of Yugoslavia, Israel and the Arabs, Northern Ireland and the...