The Kennedys on Reelz

well, jackie didn't have a boston accent, she had a strange. eastern long island twang. i didn't notice katie falling in and out, though it's certainly possible, but i certainly didn't think her accent vacillated beyond the one she was gunning for. not a big deal to me...

 

Begins Sunday....

http://www.history.ca/thekennedys/about.aspx

 

Not a big deal, but it did seem to go from Long Island to Boston to even southern in the earlier episodes. Haven't noticed a difference in the later ones.

 

No... and no.

 

I know it shows Cheers reruns in the afternoons. I also watched a terrible Reese Witherspoon movie on that channel last week.

 

The house ads I saw didn't do a real good job of explaining what the network offers, I have to say.

 

Oh, look. Yet another movie/series/miniseries/documentary on the Kennedeys. Yawn.

 

To people who have watched it, does it seem pretty middle of the road and unbiased? The History Channel dropped it at least ostensibly because of creator Joel Surnow's (think "24") supposed conservatism. I haven't watched it, so I have no idea how much truth there is to that.

 

i ithink it has been, not flawless, certainly, but solid. but 'down the middle' to you and me is not 'down the middle' to the kennedys; as i noted before, i think jfk and rfk come off as having their hearts in the right place, politics-wise (granted, i'm an unabashed fans of theirs) but i'm sure the kennedy family muscled up on the 'history channel' for the (accurate) portrayal of papa joe, less-than-flattering portrayal of mama rose and especially their heartbreaking treatment of daughter rosemary.

 

It really breaks no new ground. Anyone who has read about the Kennedys knows this stuff. They don't show White House orgies; on the other hand, they do show the Dr Feelgood stuff.

I thought the Reagan miniseries that got shoved out under protest was relatively benign, and feel the same way about this one. It's not pretending to be a factual documentary.

 

So it's running on the History Channel in Canada? Weird. I got sucked into the History of Us last year, and while it was interesting, I found it odd that they outsourced a lot of the production to South Africa. I enjoy learning history through the stories of "regular" people who had an idea, found themselves in a crucial moment at the right time or simply by accident. The fact it was underwritten by Bank of America and seemed to tilt toward "entreprenural endeavor" didn't bother me so much as that it seemed to leave out a lot of stuff that are benchmarks in our history.
The History Channel would be wise to do a 30 for 30 kind of deal, allowing various people from a wide spectrum to produce docs on topics of their choosing and let the chips fall where they do.
Got to be better than Pawn Stars and Ice Road Truckers.

 

I didn't watch the whole thing; I watched a couple episodes, then fast-forwarded through the others on demand.



1) Not one mention of Ted Kennedy, who was still alive during production and conceivably could have fired back.

2) Not one mention of the Apollo program. (Somewhere, Nixon is beaming.)

3) Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of quick shots of JFK popping pills, though. Every time the camera cut, he popped more pills.

4) A lot of screaming anachronisms in the writing: 90s/00s terms like "pushback," "get my head around it," "calling them out," etc etc.

5) They had no reluctance depicting Oswald as the sole murderer of JFK. However, Sirhan Sirhan, who was actually caught in the act of shooting RFK, is never shown or referred to by name.