Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

Well, it’s over. Last week the six-hour, multi-million-dollar Frontline/American Experience production God in Americaaired on PBS. Now the debate over its merits begins.

Reviews from journalists have been mostly positive, although New York Timestelevision critic Mike Hale was not totally impressed. The show, he wrote, was “stuffed with facts and dates and figures” and sometimes strained “to find a way to tie them together.” He also called it “an unusually serious and, to use a word the producers would probably rather not see, intellectual endeavor for television, one that doesn’t make many compromises for short attention spans.”

Some professional historians and scholars of American religion, in contrast, criticized the show from the opposite direction. This is not a surprise. After all, when has the academic community ever been comfortable watching its territory invaded by an army of people lacking PhDs? On blogs, religion and history listserves, and chat rooms around the country, academics have labeled the series “oversimplified,” “truly bizarre,” “simplistic,” “intolerable,” “uneventful,” “underwhelming.” Essentially they are calling the series not enough of an “intellectual endeavor.” MORE @ Religion Dispatches

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