America: The Story of Us

I don't usually watch the History Channel regularly. I'll turn it on from time to time when I'm bored, and usually I'll catch something interesting. I did this around the Memorial Day weekend a couple months ago, and caught an opportunity to sit through this whole series. It's twelve hours about the history of America, and while it wasn't quite as comprehensive as I'd hoped, it was still a very well produced look at the last four hundred years in this country.

The general format is Liev Schreiber narrating over some actors in period dress pretending to do something sort of interesting, accompanied by flashy computer generated shots of some sort of technology spreading across the country as the music swells. A random collection of celebrities, some more suited for discussing history than others, will put their own two cents in on various topics, and every fifteen minutes Liev declares that some new idea or device would change the course of history forever, and then they'd cut to commercial. The writing was a bit overwrought like that, and it seemed to focus more on specific important events than giving a more complete overview of history, but while it wasn't really comprehensive it was still an interesting watch. It definitely brought up a lot of memories of US history class in high school, if nothing else.