San Diego TelevisionKen Burns' "The War" on PBS
And: NBC's "The Bionic Woman" and CBS's "The Big Bang Theory" It’s been 62 years since atomic bombs incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended World War II. Since then, Americans have fought in Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf. The battle of Iraq goes on. Still, when Americans of a certain age speak simply of "the war," they mean only one. Some 50 to 60 million people died in that war, and 85 million served in uniform. The United States suffered 405,000 military casualties fighting the Axis nations of Germany, Italy and Japan. Just the fact that the worldwide death total remains in doubt by a margin of 10 million souls is one sobering measure of the magnitude of the conflagration. Small wonder that so many of those who served consider the years from 1942 to 1945 the most important of their lives. They dedicated those years to a cause far greater than themselves. For the rest of their lives, they could proudly and rightly say they spent those years saving the world. Now, prodigious filmmaker Ken Burns beams history’s spotlight on them and what they accomplished in “The War” on PBS, a seven-part, 15-hour chronicle of "the greatest cataclysm in history." Despite its faults – and it has a few – “The War” will no doubt stand as the definitive cinematic history of the Second World War, just as Burns’ “The Civil War,” “Baseball” and “Jazz” defined their subjects for all time. (The first episode, the two-and-a-half-hour “A Necessary War,” airs at 8 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 23, on KPBS/Cable 11. Future episodes air at the same time Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and Sept. 30, Oct. 1 and 2. All are repeated later in the overnight hours.) First, to answer a question on the minds of many San Diegans: although San Diego was a major wartime military base, a jumping-off place for Pacific operations and the home of war industries, the city does not play a role in “The War.” It is mentioned only once, in the final episode. KPBS has tried to fill the gap with two original half-hour productions that follow the Sunday and Monday episodes, “San Diego: The War Years,” and “San Diegans Remember the War.” Both are earnest and informative efforts, even if they lack the grandeur and sweep of Burns’ patented epic style of filmmaking. One Pearl Harbor sailor, now a San Diegan, remembers what he thought when the attack began: “Somebody’s gonna catch hell for this someday.” Padres announcer Jerry Coleman, a former New York Yankees second-baseman who’s never made much fuss about his heroics as a Marine pilot in World War II and Korea, recalls that he was 17 years old and playing baseball in Alameda when he first heard the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. His first response: “Where’s Pearl Harbor?” He enlisted as soon as he could. “The War” tells its story through the people of four American towns: Mobile, Ala., Sacramento, Calif., Waterbury, Conn., and Luverne, Minn. The first three had populations of about 100,000 when the war began, the last about 3,000. Other than the fact that Mobile was a Jim Crow town in the segregated south and Sacramento was home to many Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps, the towns are not markedly different from each other. Burns’ film would have provided a fuller experience if he had added, say, one major city to the mix. Lives were changed in big cities every bit as much as they were in small-town America. And, it’s impossible not to notice, theirs was a time quite unlike our own. The nation – the whole nation, not just those in uniform – dedicated itself to the cause, from working in defense industries to buying war bonds and enduring the rationing of gasoline and food. Movie stars and famous athletes served in the armed forces, as did four sons of President Roosevelt. Taxes were not cut, the president did not encourage American citizens to support the war by shopping. Burns shows us plenty of wartime gore through newsreels and combat photography, traces the progress of major movements with helpful maps, skillfully weaves tales of personal lives with the tides of history, even offers sharp criticism of some decisions made by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But above all he reminds us from start to finish that the war remains the most significant event in the lives of those who lived through it and fought it. One D-Day veteran remembers how, during the peak of the storm of the invasion, he led his buddies to a path sheltered from the onslaught of German gunfire. “Probably the biggest thing I ever did in my life was get those 12 men off the beach,” he says 63 years later. Burns (along with co-producer-director Lynn Novick and writer Geoffrey C. Ward) has not only given us one more major film that reminds us why we need PBS (Who else would take on a project of this scope?), he’s done it just in time. If he had waited much longer, it would be too late to hear the testimony of many of the veterans whose memories are the heart, soul and backbone of “The War.” All of them are on the sunset side of 80 now, and five of the men he interviewed have since died. They are Ray Leopold of Waterbury, Clyde Odum of Mobile, and William Perkins, Harry Schmid and Tim Tokuno of Sacramento. ------------- The networks are rolling out their fall series over the next few weeks and the only sane reaction to some of them is “Wha-a-a-at? Why?” Consider NBC’s “The Bionic Woman,” a re-make of the 1970s series that starred Lindsay Wagner. I mean, if you’re going to revive a 1970s show about a female super-hero, the one to copy is “Wonder Woman” with Lynda Carter. That was the cool, campy, cartoony one. “Bionic Woman” was just a boring, obvious, lame spin-off of “The Six-Million-Dollar Man.” The new “Bionic Woman,” with Michelle Ryan, is just as tedious as the first, but more pretentious and weighted down with a sudsy back-story. At least the original “Bionic Woman” had Max, the bionic dog. This time, she doesn’t even own a cat. (9 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 26, on KNSD/Cable 7) CBS has refashioned CW's strange, sweet and oddly appealing reality show “Beauty and the Geek” into a sitcom. In the occasionally funny “The Big Bang Theory” (8:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 24, on KFMB/Channel 8), two brilliant but hopelessly nerdy young physicists live across the hall from a dishy blonde waitress, Penny (Kaley Cuoco). As they meet, she’s mourning four years wasted in a relationship that just went sour. “That’s as long as high school,” she wails. “It took you four years to get through high school?” answers brainy but clueless Sheldon (Jim Parsons). Roommate Leonard (Johnny Galecki) fantasizes that he might get somewhere with Penny: “Our babies will be smart and beautiful.” “Not to mention imaginary,” says Sheldon. “The Big Bang Theory” could get somewhere in CBS’s potent Monday comedy lineup.  Robert P. Laurence About the author: Robert P. Laurence was television critic at the San Diego Union-Tribune for 21 years. He previously wrote about politics, jazz, rock 'n' roll and all manner of news. He graduated in journalism from San Francisco State University, and earned an M.A. in political science at San Jose State. He's lived in San Diego since 1971. More by this author Subscribe to Television:
|
Weather
Share This Page |
