Boston Globe: Burns' National Park Series Reaches "New Heights"

ED SIEGEL
New heights for Burns and PBS
By Ed Siegel | September 30, 2009

A SIX-PART SERIES on national parks? I was skeptical, even with Ken Burns as producer/director. The closest I’ve come to a national park is flying over the Grand Canyon on my way to Vegas. And with last Sunday’s first part competing against some of television’s best shows - “Mad Men,’’ “Dexter,’’ and “Curb Your Enthusiasm’’ - I gave it a half-hour to make its case.

Two hours later, I was still transfixed. Burns has become something of the poster child for what the pioneers of television thought television could achieve. Though often satirized for romanticism and sentimentality, Burns has made subjects as diverse as the Civil War, jazz, baseball, and Mark Twain the matter for water-cooler discussion. No small feat when that dialogue usually revolves around Paula Abdul and Jay Leno.

Something else that’s rare for television artists - Burns connects people to their better selves. “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,’’ which runs through the week, takes you out of your normal workaday mindset with its magnificent, Kubrickian photography and sharply etched historical profiles of inspirational figures like John Muir and Frederick Law Olmsted and the fight they waged to keep these places from becoming kitschy overdeveloped theme parks.

You could say the same about public television. Early attempts at privatizing places like Niagara Falls resulted in hucksterism and the despoiling of the landscape, despite the claims of entrepreneurs that places like Yosemite would be better preserved in private hands. It’s reminiscent of anti-PBS screeds of 20 years ago by the likes of George Will saying that there was no need for funding of public television because cable did the same job better, citing services like A&E and Bravo.

That argument was, at best, shortsighted. These two cable services have long since given up the ghost of arts coverage. The same night that “The National Parks’’ was premiering on PBS, A&E was airing reruns of “CSI: Miami’’ and “Criminal Minds’’ while Bravo had a “Law & Order: Criminal Intent’’ marathon, competing with a James Bond night on BBC America. Programming on Ovation and Discovery is less commercial, but they’re still a far cry from PBS.

And it isn’t just the occasional Burns series. I recently got an advance look at a riveting “Masterpiece Contemporary’’ drama, “Endgame,’’ about the behind-the-scenes negotiations leading to the end of apartheid in South Africa, and caught a repeat of an excellent “American Masters’’ documentary on choreographer Jerome Robbins. As good as the HBO TV movies are, I can’t imagine HBO would have found “Endgame’’ commercial enough. Ovation’s arts documentaries aren’t in the same league as “American Masters.’’

As other television entities turn their valuable places on the dial into the video equivalent of the early Niagara Falls, it’s all the more important to have one station that has something besides numbers in its programming philosophy. “Nature gives strength to body and soul alike,’’ said Muir, and the same can be said for PBS at its best.

Not that it’s always at its best. The lack of funding often results in safe programming, particularly around pledge time, but to me that’s always been an argument for more government money, not less. (I haven’t included radio in this discussion because I’m an indirect beneficiary of public funding, as a contributor to arts and entertainment coverage on public radio station WBUR.)

Some time during Sunday night’s first show, my wife and I concluded that we ought to forget about France and get me a little closer to the national parks. What more can you want from television than both bringing the world into your living room and taking you out of your living room into the world?

Conservative bloggers have identified “The National Parks’’ as propaganda for big government, but they miss the larger picture. As historian William Cronon said, the national parks are “closer to paradise than anything Europe has to offer.’’ For showing us that, Ken Burns, as he has in the past, makes you proud to be an American.

Freelance writer Ed Siegel is a former television and theater critic for the Globe.