Set your DVRs. From the NYTimes review:
Flappers in speakeasies and biddies beating temperance drums: hardly seems a recipe for modern-day relevance.
Yet you can hear history talking directly to the Americans of 2011 all through “Prohibition,” an absorbing five-and-a-half-hour documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that runs for three nights, beginning on Sunday on PBS stations. Especially now, the story of America’s disastrous experiment with banning alcoholic beverages seems made for Santayana’s phrase about learning from the past or being condemned to repeat it.
The template that Mr. Burns first used more than 20 years ago in his landmark series on the Civil War gets a boost from the availability of plenty of film to augment the slow pans of still photographs. The generals of wartime are replaced by an impossibly colorful cast of characters: the hatchet-wielding Carrie Nation; Wayne Wheeler, the master manipulator behind the Anti-Saloon League; showboating gangsters like Al Capone.
And, more subtly, the divisions explored in “The Civil War” — North/South, black/white — are replaced by others just as sharp (and still familiar today): native-born versus immigrant, rural heartland versus the cities.
Over three nights and five and half hours, Prohibition provides a very fine analytic survey of the noble experiment, and most criticisms of it are quibbles. However, if you are the type of viewer who, after The Civil War and Baseball, gets ticked off by certain Burnsian tics of style, then consider yourself warned. I mean, when the film recounts the moment that Carrie Nation received a message from God to vandalize saloons, a reading of her words plays over an image of yellow sunlight gracing a rural cobweb. There are a couple of corny re-creations of phone calls placed by the blockbuster bootlegger Roy Olmstead to his accomplices. But these seem a small price to pay for the delights of the series’ archival footage and sturdy exposition—and for the sozzled trumpet that rings in the ridiculous era stretching from 1920 to 1933.
An NPR interview with Burns goes live on the web at noon eastern time. The preview…
Watch the full episode. See more Ken Burns.