How delicious: Ken Burns might want to make his final documentary a history of the French Revolution

Off to a tumbril

Would-be PBS filmmakers attack Ken Burns

Is it time to cancel Ken Burns at PBS? It’s not easy being a white, male, cisgender filmmaker these days over at the taxpayer-funded public television network. Burns has achieved immense success for his documentaries made for PBS and has been generously rewarded for his work there. A group of nearly 140 filmmakers and other professionals is blasting PBS for a lack of diversity behind the scenes. Their complaint says there is just too much Ken Burns. 

A group of people that includes filmmakers, producers, directors, executives, and programmers signed on with their support after an essay by a Korean-American filmmaker was published by the Ford Foundation. The purpose was to lodge a complaint that PBS is too dependent on Burns, “America’s storyteller”, for its programming. The woke are going against their own network, in other words, because of what amounts to what looks like professional jealousy. 

Grace Lee, an independent producer, director, and writer working in both narrative and nonfiction film, according to her byline on the essay, credits her career to PBS. She now asks “how much does PBS reflect the audiences it was intended to serve?” She compares the time given to documentaries by Burns versus that of her own, which was on Asian Americans.

From the occasional comments I’ve read from Mr. Burns (a college classmate of several of my friends, who shares my same 1953 birth date, and may also share some Huguenot ancestors, coincidentally, ) I’m sure we’re on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but his documentaries are superb, engrossing, and accurate. I’m certainly no authority on the Civil War or country music, for instance, but I do know quite a bit about both, and Burns’ films on those subjects were not only accurate, they added amazing amounts of historical information I’d never have happened upon on my own.

So I’ll be sorry to see him go — he’s already gone full Mao self-criticism mode; Ken, we Huguenots were made of sterner stuff — and I will no longer tune into PBS to see what my tax dollars have wrought, but it’s interesting to watch the decline and fall of a nation, live.