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Showing posts with the label Richard Ellison

Documentary Review: 'Vietnam: A Television History' (American Experience Edition)

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(C) 1983, 2004 WGBH Boston The Series On Tuesday, October 4, 1983, PBS stations across the U.S. aired Roots of a War (1945-1953) , the first of 13 parts of Vietnam: A Television History. Co-produced by WGBH, Boston's PBS station, with Britain's Central Independent Television/UK and France's Antenne-2 in association with  LRE Productions, this documentary miniseries was an in-depth look at America's "lost crusade" in Vietnam, starting with France's failed attempt to reassert its colonial authority after World War II and ending with America's withdrawal from Southeast Asia and the North Vietnamese capture of Saigon, South Vietnam's capital. The series - as the New York Times' reviewer wrote in 1983 - was "a landmark of television journalism" because it attempted to " tell us what things were, not what we might have liked them to be."  The conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal called it "an extraordinary film