I have been trying to avoid this, but I have to chime in with jack. I only watched about half the shows, because I really thought it was poor. My view might have been colored by all the appearances Ken Burns made preceding the show in which he made a big deal of the fact that he tried to make a series with as negative a view as possible and refused to glorify the war. His view was that the war was remembered as a "bloodless war" due to all the "greatest generation" shows, and he wanted to set the record straight. His stated goal for the series was to show how terrible war (in the generic sense) really is. He stated that there had been more than enough war documentaries, but he decided to make this one to set the record straight.
I think he is totally out of touch with the general feeling in America on this issue. I don't believe anybody views this as a bloodless war. Just see the four pages of posts above for proof. However, most of the people I know who went through it did it gladly, and say they would have done it again, even those who came back traumatized. My dad spent over four years overseas in Iran in a small, strange group called the Persian Gulf Command which has been the subject of several specials and books in the last few years. For him, it was both the most trying time in his life and also the most defining. I personally believe that if any group of people fighting any war deserve to be glorified, it is the veterans of WWII.
I thought the civil war series was likely the best series ever produced by PBS. I also liked the jazz series. While I found the footage in the WWII series interesting, I found it sadly lacking as a documentary. I too thought the four town approach was very limiting. I thought the flow was very disjointed, with too much about some issues and too little about others. Most importantly, I thought it was a very well concealed PC piece aimed at our current foreign policies. I don't think I am alone in this view. The Wall Street Journal even ran a very negative review along these same lines.
