So, anybody watching this series? I am, and I find it pretty fascinating. I’ve learned a lot from it so far.
I’m not a huge history buff, but it seems to me like it’s probably a good 85% accurate and 15% glossed over fluff. From an artistic standpoint, it’s pretty solid. Decent acting, good narration, and awesome graphics.
I tried to watch a couple minutes of it lastnight. I tuned in just as they were showing an illustration of a man being shot by a musket-ball. The camera went into slow-mo X-ray vision mode to show exactly how the ball would penetrate the target and fragment shards of bone into muscle tissue. They spent roughly five minutes talking about how much it’d hurt to be shot by a musket. Very enlightening.
I thought I’d give the show the benefit of the doubt and keep watching. I watched the entire episode. My mistake. It’s a History Channel production. I should have known it was going to be intellectually anemic. There was no insight into anything. I don’t know, does it get any better?
I catch it when I notice it’s coming on, but I don’t know the schedule so I’ve only seen a couple/few episodes.
I thought it did, but I hold The History Channel to pretty low standards.
I’ve certainly learned a few things, although I’ll hold their veracity as a little suspect. Like how New York wasn’t much of a city until the Erie Canal was built. Or the interesting link between slavery and the women’s movement. Or what a brilliant military tactician Abe Lincoln was.
I watched the whole first installment, missed the second, and couldn’t get though the third (the Civil War).
I found the series to be incredibly uninformative. Too much detail was spent on on irrelevancies, and these irrelevancies were repeated over and over and over.
They showed the graphic of ship’s hulls as viewed from underwater numerous times in the first installment. It was cute the first time, but pretty stupid the sixth time.
In the Civil War installment, they showed the graphics of railroad tracks, telegraph wires, and Lincoln’s telegraph office so many times that I literally fell asleep. They glossed over all of the actual history.
The number of commercials also seem to increase exponentially during each installment. None for the first 15-20 minutes or so, and more commercials than the actual show by the end. And each time they returned from a commercial, they spend a few minutes catching the audience up.
I’ve seen most of the first two episodes and agree with the criticisms. (The Erie Canal stuff was the most interesting for me – I didn’t know any of that.)
I think it’d be a good choice for a basic history class, maybe at junior high level. It’s visually interesting for an audience accustomed to high-tech visuals. Maybe it’ll encourage people to read/watch more in-depth stuff on their own.
A few weeks ago the boyfriend and I were having a lazy Sunday, searching for something to watch on TV. The Boo Hiss Story channel was having a freakin’ “Pawn Stars” marathon(why, god, why?) of which we endured a couple of episodes and during it they kept showing commercials for TSoU. We said in unison “why can’t they be showing a marathon of that?”, which after watching a few episodes we now understand. Don’t get me wrong; I’d much rather watch three hours of that than pretty much any of the other dreck you find on the so called educational channels, but we were disappointed. Next Sunday, however, features the construction of the Statue of Liberty, which, though I know the history of her very well, never ceases to thrill me.
Yes, visually interesting, but more anecdotes than real history.
Did anyone else notice the end credits: “Produced with the assistance of the Department and Trade and Industry South Africa, who does not accept any liability for the content and does not necessarily support such content.” What’s up with that?
I commented in a CS thread here (about the History channel in general) that it felt like an 8th grade social studies textbook come to life. A very superficial and rather jingoistic overview of American history.
That said, my 11 year old son loves the series and we all watch it for the two hours on Sunday nights. Granted, this also means a late bedtime for him but he actually watches it as opposed to fiddling about in his chair, hoping I don’t notice and send him to bed. During the commercials, my wife and I talk with him and fill in some of the holes the program leaves – the ridiculously enormous error of Custer’s attack, the connection between “states rights” and slavery during the Civil War, the fact that England was trying to recoup the costs of the French-Indian War with its pre-Revolution taxes, etc. He’s sincerely interested in it and asks questions.
So, as shallow (and CGI laden with the same scenes over and over and over) as the series seems to me, I can’t really hate on it. An active interest now means he might have some initiative to look up the gritty details as he gets older.
Not much grist for the serious history buff, but I suppose if you know very little about American history it’s a reasonable introduction.
I’m liking it. It glosses over the major points, and focuses on the little details you don’t know about. I know the Civil War, but I didn’t know about how Lincoln used the telegraph or about African-American cowboys. Yeah, its not perfect but getting people interested in history by presenting it in a cool way is not a bad thing.
Yes, it glosses over some things a lot. They really don’t go into much depth. And aren’t they repeating some things that just are legend and not really factual? I mean, didn’t Paul Revere get stopped at some point during his ride? Wasn’t William Dawes significant on that night?
But what’s really annoying is when they have the celebrity person say something totally obvious. Something like “The American Revolution was really important.” And basically repeats what the narrator just said.
Oh, and as a drinking game, take a drink every time someone says that an event was a “turning point.” Christ, every frickin’ second in the damn Revolution was a turning point according to them.
They’re probably disavowing all of the slavery stuff. 
It may be superficial as far as major points in our history. For those of us who grew up when the schools were teaching history from grade school into high school, of course it seams superficial. When schools cut budgets or have to meet certain mandated standards some curriculum gets cut and unfortunately that includes history, and geography.
Well, the series seems to have settled into being “The Story of Us New Yorkers.”
I should have expected it when they gave so much early focus to the Erie Canal.
It is a New Yorker [del]bug[/del] feature… 
http://mappery.com/map-of/A-View-of-World-from-9th-Avenue-Map
I thought is was OK. But it should have been called “The Story of us Europeans (and a few Africans and Asians).” Almost nothing about the natives.
I’ve got it on Tivo, and am watching it whenever I have time . . . if only to fill in some of the gaps in my own knowledge of history. But my biggest criticism is the same criticism I have for everything on the History Channel: their non-stop background noise that’s way louder than it should be to qualify as “background,” along with visual “punctuation.” It’s very distracting, especially when there’s dialog at the same time.
I’ve been digging it from the start. I find it (and shows like it) very comforting, sort of the tv equivalent of comfort food.
hehheh, no kidding. The one that gets me is “changed the world forever.” Boy that world sure does change a lot, especially in NYC.
I was incredibly disappointed to see the only mention given to the Great Chicago Fire was in a Bank of America commercial. Especially since the Fire was directly connected to the birth of the skyscraper which was supposedly the focus of the first half of the show (the genesis of the modern metropolis).
We got mentioned for race riots and Al Capone though. No such thing as bad publicity, eh?