Thursday, March 26, 2020

Thursday Movie Picks #298: Documentary series (TV edition)





This being Thursday, it's normally time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the last Thursday of the month, it's time for another TV edition. This month, the theme is documentary series. I've said a lot that I don't watch a lot of episodic television these days, so I don't know much about the current documentary series. This means I took the easy way out:

Nova (1974-present). PBS series of science documentaries, although I think in recent years they may have gotten away from hour-long documentaries to episodes with multiple pieces. I may be confusing that with Scientific American Frontiers, however, a different science series that ran on PBS from 1990 to 2005 and was hosted by Alan Alda.

Frontline (1983-present). PBS series with current events documentaries, taking a deeper look at one issue in the news over an hour. One of the episodes I remember is "Innocence Lost", which examined one of the daycare sex abuse hoax cases which were a thing in 1980s America, this one in Edenton, NC. (Showtime, I think, did a TV movie about the much more infamous McMartin case out in Los Angeles.)

P.O.V (1988-present). Series running independent documentaries of varying themes. One particularly interesting feature I remember is one from the mid-1990s called "Taking on the Kennedys", about a man who ran for Congress in Rhode Island in 1994 against Patrick Kennedy (Ted's son, if memory serves), and the uphill climb he faced both as a Republican in a blue state (not that red/blue had taken hold then), and as an underfunded candidate against someone with a famous name and star power on call.

1 comment:

Birgit said...

I do love watching Nova which focuses on one thing for that hour or it could even be a 2 parter. I have also watched Frontline which is quite a good series. I could have chosen Nature as well which is on before Nova. I don't know your last one though. Oh, I also love The Nature of Things.