MTV is not the first channel that comes to mind when you think of great documentaries. But the the original teen music channel has an outstanding one that starts Thursday at 10 p.m. in 16 & Pregnant.

Parents who don't go out of their way to see or record this six-week series of profiles of pregnant teenagers are making a big mistake. If you have no other involvement in your kids' media lives, make them see this. 

We live in a time of a particularly empty-headed popular culture that is filled with images and narratives that tell teen girls that a sure way to suddenly become the center of attention from friends and family is to get pregnant. Think of the feature film, Juno, and The Secret Life of the American Teenager, the hit cable series on the ABC Family Channel. Or, consider the way Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's pregnant teen daughter, Bristol, and the girl's boyfriend were characterized as role models by some speakers at last year's Republican National Convention.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)
Categories: Documentaries
        

Trouble the Water, an Oscar-nominated 2008 documentary that tells the story of Hurricane Katrina from within the eye of the storm, has been shown at festivals and in theaters during the last year. But it gets its TV premiere Thursday night at 8:30 on HBO, and it will likely reach more viewers in one night on the premium pay channel than it did in all previous festival and theatrical showings.

And that's a good thing, because this is a great story told with passion not just about an epic storm, but about a country and a government that didn't have hardly any compassion for many of its victims.

It's inevitable that any documentary about Katrina is going to be compared to Spike Lee's towering 2005 film, When the Levees Broke, so let me quickly say Trouble the Waters does not have its elegiac lyricism or sense of poetry that Lee's does. But it does have something that Lee's film doesn't have -- eyewitness, home-movie footage of the storm arriving and a family fighting for its life -- and that is what makes the film such a special social document.

Continue reading "HBO documentary: seeing Katrina from ground zero" »

Posted by David Zurawik at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Documentaries
        

Are media workers driving stakes into their own hearts by embracing shorter and shorter forms of digital storytelling -- thereby helping create even shorter attention spans among young audience members?

That's one of the questions posed by Leo Eaton, the Maryland-based producer of such high-end PBS and BBC documentaries as Michael Wood's The Story of India, in an informal annual state of the industry letter sent to friends and colleagues Monday.

Eaton generously gave me permission to share what he said with readers of this blog. Here'a a bite that seems especially timely with Ken Burns losing his GM funding last month and PBS Monday night launching We Shall Remain, a five-part series on Native American history, the likes of which, some analysts say, we are not likley to see again.

Continue reading "Documentaries struggle for place in new media world" »

Posted by David Zurawik at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Documentaries
        

One of the more shameful aspects of non-fiction film making in this nation involves the lack of major projects chronicling the Native American experience.

The lack of historical storytelling about Native Americans is the best evidence I know to support the cynical cultural studies argument that history is merely the stories told by those who won the wars and hold the power.

I fear that We Shall Remain, a five-part series that starts Monday night on PBS, arrives on too fragmented a TV landscape and at a time when viewers are too preoccupied with the current economic crisis to take much notice of any historical epic that demands a major commitment of time.

But give PBS and the American Experience series great praise for trying to make sure that the Native American narrative is told in such a way that it reflects the truth of that experience and finds a home in the nation's consciousness and conscience.

Continue reading "PBS tells Native American history with power, care" »

Posted by David Zurawik at 6:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Documentaries, PBS, TV Review
        

The great sports documentaries are the ones that manage to wed their game stories to the culture and politics of the times in which they were played.

HBO’s Thrilla in Manila, which chronicles the epic rivalry between heavyweight boxers Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, is steeped in the racial and social class issues that separated the two men and fueled the famous 1975 showdown in the Philippines from which the film’s title is drawn.

If Thrilla is not a great sports documentary, it’s on the waiting list – only a half cut or so off the pace. Catch it. If not Saturday night in its premiere at 8, then in one of its many HBO replays: Sunday, Tuesday, Friday or April 19, 22 and 28.

There is an added treat for Baltimore and Maryland area viewers: Radio station WYPR newsman Sunni Khalid is featured as one of the talking heads in the documentary, and Khalid is on the money time and again in his analyses of the fighters and the post-1960’s racial politics at play.

Continue reading "HBO's Thrilla in Manila: a knockout documentary" »

Posted by David Zurawik at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
Categories: Documentaries, HBO, TV Review
        

I love the concept, but I am not so crazy about the execution of College Life, a new reality TV series debuting Monday night on MTV.

The premise involves giving four entering freshmen at the University of Wisconsin digital cameras and letting them chronicle their passage from high school to life at one the nation's best academic institutions in one of its greatest cities, Madison, Wisconsin. (Full disclosure: If the "best" and "great" adjectives sound excessive, the fact that I graduated from UW might have played a tiny role in my choice of words.)

But, seriously, I was eagerly awaiting the screener on this series, because I wanted to see how the new, lightweight, easy-to-use digital filmmaking technology would work out in the hands of these freshmen. I have long thought the new cameras could be better used in everything from daily journalism to ethnographic studies. If reality TV had to be the testing ground where they first proved their worth at taking viewers inside subcultures and behind closed doors, so be it. I was also excited about the series, because I believe going off to college is such an important rite of passage for so many people -- one that often defines the arc of the rest of their lives.

Continue reading "MTV offers skewed look at college life from inside out" »

Posted by David Zurawik at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Categories: Documentaries, TV Review
        

This might come as a shock to readers who have been following the screwy programming exploits of Maryland Public Television at this blog the last four months, but MPT has finally done something right -- something very right. It has produced a solid, in many respects, first-rate biography of former Gov. William Donald Schaefer.

The one-hour film, titled Citizen Schaefer, will premiere at 9 p.m. Monday on MPT, and it is worth going out of your way to see. For long-time Baltimore and Maryland residents, it vividly brings back a sense of the 1960's political tumult out of which Schaefer, the political figure, emerged. For more recent arrivals to the area, it will help explain the peculiar politics of this city, state and region.

The best thing about the film: As much of an appreciation of Schaefer as it is, and as much as it sidesteps the darker side of behind-closed-doors politics in places like Baltimore in the 1960s, the production is not a simplistic one-dimensional whitewash of the man and his career.

Continue reading "MPT has a winner in film on William Donald Schaefer" »

Posted by David Zurawik at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Baltimore Television, Documentaries, PBS, TV Review
        

Baltimore native Ira Glass brings his This American Life public radio troupe back to the big screen next month for a two-hour stage production that will be seen in theaters nationwide -- including three in the Baltimore area.

Here's the way the promoters describe it -- and the way to get tickets. (Note the scheduled musical performance by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.):

On Thursday, April 23rd 8:00 p.m. (EDT) This American Life – Live! will return to movie screens with a live simulcast performance of the radio show. Originating from the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University, the event will take place in more than 400 movie theaters nationwide.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 8:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Baltimore Television, Documentaries