Why Ken Burns won't leave PBS for HBO

Channels with Peter Kafka

Vox Media Podcast Network

Business News, News, Tv & Film, Technology

4.4 • 585 Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2017

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Documentarian Ken Burns talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about his new 18-hour documentary, "The Vietnam War." Burns says he sought to upend conventional wisdom about the war by rewinding the iconic images, stories and music of the time and telling history through the lens of all the countries involved in the fighting. He believes we are in a "golden age" of documentaries, but Burns says he has no desire to leave his career-long home, PBS, for a more digital-focused platform like HBO, Netflix or Amazon. He also talks about how war documentaries will change now that no one writes letters anymore, why critics have stopped fretting about the length of his films and why it's okay to watch that cute cat video online — so long as you come back to something more substantial later on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is RICO Media with Peter Kafka.
0:02.7	That's me.
0:03.2	I'm part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:05.8	I'm recording this episode in San Francisco, which is pretty cool, even cooler.
0:09.3	I'm here with documentarian Ken Burns, who you know from making a million things.
0:14.0	So, or baseball.
0:15.2	How many more?
0:16.2	32.
0:16.9	32.
0:18.2	And we're here today to talk about the Vietnam War, which depending on when you hear
0:22.8	this, should be airing on PBS. Starting Sunday, September 17th. And eventually, you can watch
0:28.7	it, I'm assuming, online, eventually at some point, migrate somewhere else. Immediately, you can
0:32.5	stream the first five episodes that Sunday, and then the following Sunday Sunday when the second five get launched you can
0:38.5	stream the others and then it's a weekly series and there the DVDs are available on the 19th
0:44.1	and it's going to run as a weekly series until Christmas and it'll be hard to miss 10 episodes
0:49.9	18 hours 18 hours so I've watched three of the hours so far.
0:54.9	They're great.
0:58.2	You know, this is a really complicated story.
1:01.3	It needed that amount of time.
1:04.5	It's something that Americans don't really want to talk about.
1:12.8	And if they do, they sort of just default to a kind of binary one and zero dialectic, you know, good, bad, red state, blue state.
1:15.7	And it's important, it seemed to us, to unpack that stuff.
	...

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