Avoid. I caught the original, I don’t need to see the reruns.
I missed Jon Stewart’s monologue when his show came back after the attacks. I understand it was quite moving.
I caught Dan Rather crying with David Letterman.
I avoid them. I watched the events on TV (not live- I was on the west coast, too), and that’s been enough of that for me. After the first couple hours of coverage, I didn’t even watch much 9/11 coverage on TV- I got my news from the papers (dead-tree and online), because that was easier to handle.
My folks will be visiting us next week, though, and I’m kind of worried that they’ll want to watch that stuff.
I used to watch them. I watched the quite a bit for about 3 years, but now, I’ve stopped.
Though some of them look really interesting and they are going after different stories.
The ones from the UK sound interesting, I wonder if BBC America will ever show them.
To clarify…I think this would be the coverage I watch, because of the journalistic aspect. It would be fascinating to see the information and misinformation dribble in, in light of what we know now.
But any other 9/11 special…nah. I’ve seen the French brothers documentary, and it is horrifying and incredibly moving. But I don’t think i want to see it again.
I know for me I thought the first plane hitting the building was an accident…the pilot must have had engine trouble. Who would deliberately fly a plane into a building?
Ivylad was much less naive, and insisted it was deliberate from the get-go. I remember thinking about calling a work colleague up in NY after the first plane hit, then thinking…nah, it’s just an accident. I don’t want to bother him.
I then saw the second plane come around, and it was so surreal. I remember seeing the plane, recognizing it was a plane, but my mind said, “Police helicopter” because who else but a police helicopter would fly that close to a burning building?
I think for me, seeing the stunned reactions on the faces of the news anchors as they realized 1) This was not an accident and for many of them 2) It was happening right down the damn street would be compelling, as they are sucked into the story instead of reporting on it.
If anyone’s interested, here it is.
I do not watch them. I lived through it, that was enough.
I don’t go out of my way to watch them but if I’m flipping through the channels and see one, I may watch it. I watch because I’m fascinated by human behavior. How do people react when hell is unleashed on earth?
I tend to avoid the dramatizations but will watch the occasional documentary.
Bingo. I won’t ever watch a docudrama about them, but documentaries are OK. I don’t need to see some dramatization about how some screenwriter thinks things unfolded in a building or on a plane, but the actual footage of the events as they were unfolding is pretty dramatic. So Oliver Stone, no. NOVA, yes.
The part of Eve Golden will be played by Kathy Bates.
I watch the documentaries, skip the reinactments.
I watched a little bit of Hamburg Cell on HBO one time - maybe five minutes. Other than that, I avoid these things like the plague. Like some other posters here, I don’t have any problem with documentaries, although I haven’t watched much of them. If I can learn something new about what happened (which was the reason Hamburg Cell caught my attention for a few minutes), I might watch. I don’t need a dramatic reenactment of something I already saw.
I’ll probably watch the ABC one, if for no other reason than that it has the left all riled up.
“How could people be so stupid? They seemed to cling to ignorance because it smelled familiar.”
–Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
Same for me. The engineer in me had to see what happened from that point of view. But I can’t watch actual footage of the day or over-dramatized reenactments. I don’t need to get all weepy and depressed. The real thing tore me apart enough.
I did see John Stewart - that tore me up, too.
Hmm, I don’t watch them but I also don’t actively avoid them. The movies, haven’t seen any but then I haven’t been to the movies in a long time either. With the TV specials it’s been more that I either didn’t know they were on or there was something else I wanted to watch.
Absolutely avoid.
And here’s Rather on Letterman, and also Letterman by himself: “Will that make any sense, will that make any goddamn sense.”
I think the last thing I watched on it was the CBS 9/11 documentary. I still read articles, and watch videos of Letterman, or Stewart, and the news coverage as it was happening (from YouTube). The New York Times has online issues from the first few days after the attacks. It isn’t something I do very often, but I try to do it enough to remind myself of what happened, and remind myself of what it was like before everything became politicized.