Slightly ahead of schedule I've been spending my evenings in autumnal mode: stretched out on the sofa watching DVDs of the latest, highly addictive American TV series. When it was over I felt as bereft as if the World Cup or Olympics had come to an end. I'm tempted, for reasons we'll come back to, to start over again from the beginning.
The series is not a crime drama – though it could hardly be more dramatic. It's Ken Burns's documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, a masterpiece even by his standards. The Civil War (1990) was hailed as the best series of its kind since The World at War. In a way, it was even more impressive since the absence of moving images meant that Burns had to rely entirely on photographs – an inventive necessity that has become one of his trademarks.
Another is the extended duration of his projects. This, so to speak, is a long-running critical joke about the slow-Burns approach: irrespective of its actual length any individual instance is overlong. The Dust Bowl (2012) was only four hours but it should have been three, and so on. The landmark series Jazz (20 hours, 2001) was more complicated. On the one hand, it felt as if too much emphasis was given to minor swing outfits from the 1930s; on the other, everything that happened from 1961 onwards had to be crammed into the final couple of hours. So it was both too long and too short! If you were of the Larkin persuasion – that it was all downhill from Charlie Parker onwards – the proportioning might have been music to your ears. No one would contest the defining roles assigned to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, but if you felt that the artistic peaks of jazz were attained after 1940 – from the late 50s particularly – then the series became a kind of pre-history requiring numerous extra episodes to redress a distortion that gave more prominence to Tommy Dorsey than Charles Mingus.
But look at it another way. How often do you watch a TV series and learn anything new about a subject you already know a bit about? Very rarely. On the mistaken assumption that I already knew plenty about it, I ignored Jazz for a decade. It turned out to be a revelation, a joy and an education.
When it came to The Roosevelts, I was in the opposite situation. I knew there were two of them (father and son, maybe, like the Bushes?), that Franklin D was disabled by polio, that he steered America out of the Great Depression and into the second world war. I knew that his wife Eleanor was famously progressive, that when the African-American Marian Anderson was refused permission to sing to an integrated audience at Constitution Hall the First Lady arranged for her to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (an especially gratifying scrap of knowledge, this: it's not in the film!). About Theodore – a fifth cousin, it turns out – I knew nothing except that he too had once been president. So I was the driest of sponges, ready to absorb maximum knowledge from a 14‑hour soaking. Jeez, but did I really need so protracted a soak? After all, a four-hour PBS programme (not by Burns) had told me plenty about Lyndon Johnson. Midway through the first episode of The Roosevelts it seemed like a bridge and a Burns too far.
It's so different with those drama series that get you hooked from the first moments. That, paradoxically, is what enables you to jump ship after an episode or two: the conviction that much of the intelligence and skill that has gone into their creation is designed purely to keep you watching. So sometimes, when you've been lured in and stayed the course – as happened with True Detective – you end up feeling as if you've squandered vast amounts of time on some kind of dope.
The Burns experience could not be more different. Naturally, a kind of overture presents a persuasive view of the ground to be covered but it still looks like a hell of a slog. The consequent hesitancy about plodding on suggests both another useful comparison and a compelling reason to do so. While The Wire was routinely likened to Dickens, The Roosevelts is like a sprawling Russian novel where, for the first 50 or so pages, you struggle to keep track of who's who. In this case, there's the additional burden of absorbing info about the grandparents and necessarily weighty baggage about the historical context. The solution? Just sit tight and you will be gripped, enlightened, moved and thoroughly convinced that your time could not have been more profitably spent.
The combination of epic scale and, as the subtitle claims, intimacy makes this thoroughly American story Tolstoyan – with the Dostoevskian spectres of alcoholism, depression and madness looming in the background. Eyes on the Prize, the magnificent history of the civil rights movement, is, by comparison, a chronicle of events. The Roosevelts has a psychological subtlety and depth that is virtually unprecedented in television histories.
It is achieved in Burns's signature style through prolonged immersion in the archival past (and the avoidance of any filmed re-creations of events for which no visual testimony exists), by the sustained quality of analytic narrative, by a stellar cast of voices (Eleanor's letters are read, piercingly, by Meryl Streep), and by the impeccable authority of those consulted or interviewed on screen. The chorus of experts in The Civil War was dominated by Shelby Foote who seemed to be in spirit communication with the ghosts of the Union and Confederate dead.
No single figure in the new series has quite his haunting presence but among the featured luminaries two, perhaps, stand out. Burns's long-time writing partner Geoffrey C Ward speaks of Franklin with a sympathetic intensity that is heart-rending. Columnist George Will ensures that past events are backlit so as to hurl shadows deep into the future: "Following the example of the first Roosevelt, the second Roosevelt gave us the ideal of the shimmering, glimmering presidency and with it the notion that complex problems could yield to charisma. This sets the country up for almost perpetual disappointment."
That quote might not be quite accurate. Which brings us to an intractable problem highlighted by a brilliant YouTube parody of Adam Curtis's work. In tones seductively close to Curtis's own, a voiceover assures viewers that illogical surges in the argument do not matter because five minutes later we will have forgotten what came before.
Burns eschews Curtis's visual and intellectual pyrotechnics but I'm already conscious of how much I've failed to retain from my couch marathon in the company of the Roosevelts, of how much longer I hold on to stuff learned from print. I never read a book without a pencil in hand, but rarely make notes while watching TV. An assumed weakness of the medium is also a projection of the entrenched feebleness of (my) viewing habits. That's one of the reasons I want to start over.
The Roosevelts: An Intimate History is out on DVD this month.
Ian Jack is away.
