A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2006 A&E Home Video  In 2006, back when A&E Networks'  History was still called The History Channel and occasionally broke from its increasingly lowbrow programming to air actual historically-derived content, it presented The Revolution , a 13-part documentary about the 26-year-long effort of the 13 American colonies to achieve independence from Great Britain and the birth of a new nation in the Western Hemisphere. Written by the miniseries' primary director, Alexander Emmert and Stephen Stept, The Revolution uses a blend of live-action re-enactments, illustrations, and documents from the period, animated battle maps, talking-head commentary by historians and military experts, and dramatic voice-overs to tell the complex and fascinating story of the creation of the United States. Co-directed by Emmert with executive producer and co-writer Peter Schnall (who also did many of the production-related tasks), The Revolution (also known as The American Revolution ) c...

(C) 2011 A&E Home Video WWII in HD: In November of 2009, History aired a 10-episode miniseries titled simply WWII in HD, which was "shot and remastered in high definition" and culled from - as the package blurb puts it - "three thousand hours of color film few knew existed" from several countries' archives. Essentially, producer Lou Reda and writers Matthew Ginsburg, Bruce Kennedy and Liz Reph take a page from the Ken Burns playbook and follow the wartime experiences of 12 American men and women who participate in World War II either as combatants (Jack Werner, Shelby Westbrook), caregivers (Jane Wandrey) or reporters (Robert Sherrod, Richard Tregaskis) from Pearl Harbor Day to VJ Day. The narrative, which combines color footage collected over a two-year world-wide search in Allied and Axis archives, interviews with now-elderly veterans and dramatic readings from the 12 "characters'" letters and journals to recreate as vividly as poss...

How did A&E Network's History, aka The History Channel, fall into disrepute with history buffs, historians, and TV critics? Essentially, History, which was originally named The History Channel, followed the same path as its parent network, A&E. It was seduced by television’s version of the dark side of the Force: “reality programming.”  And it was consumed by it. First, though, a little history about, well, History. Back in the 1990s, A&E started out as the Arts and Entertainment cable channel. I didn’t watch it much back then, but it used to be the “go to” channel for viewers who wanted to see programs about fine arts, music, travel to exotic places, and documentaries. Eventually, as it often happens with cable channels, the owners of A&E, which include ABC and Hearst, decided to create a separate channel devoted to historical content, primarily documentaries. And in an inspired burst of creativity, A&E named the spin-off “The History Channel.”...