I was trying to watch a documentary that sounded interesting, called First Peoples (actually I guess it’s a series). This episode was about how Homo Sap apparently got to Asia much earlier than was previously thought, and the other human species they encountered there.
But boy did they pad out the information to fill up time. Repeated scenes of ancient people walking; repeated map graphics; narration done in portentous tones. It was finally too much, I gave up after 30 minutes in a 2-hour show. I had to check to make sure I wasn’t watching one of those Ancient Mysteries shows, the treatment seemed just as over-padded.
Does PBS really need to stretch out its few serious programs like this? They could have covered the material with plenty of talking heads in half the time. “We dug and dug, and we finally (blah blah blah) found a little finger bone. Look, here’s a 5x enlargement done by a 3D printer. Here it is in the original size. It’s just a tiny bone from a child, maybe 5 or 7 years old (blah blah blah). The child turned out to be female. The bone is surprisingly robust in size considering the sex and age of the person. Blah blah blah (ad nauseam) Denisovan.” And it’s not like you could fast forward through it, you wouldn’t know where the interesting bits were.
They need a TLDW version, maybe they could put it online for those of us without the patience to sit through 2 hours of a 1-hour (or less) show.