America: the Story of Us Part 6 & Wrap Up

I am going to keep this summary short and sweet.

The final part of America: The Story of Us aired this past Monday and to be quite honest, I lost all interest in the episode. While it presented events that I was familiar with, because I had actually lived through some of them, I didn’t feel the connection with it that was there sometimes with the earlier episodes. This had more of the feeling of one of those clip-show filler episodes you get every once in a while on your favorite tv drama.

Let me explain: they would bring up an event (such as the rapid housing developments that created suburbia in the 50’s), spend a minute on the actual event, and then try and connect it to things that had happened in the past (in this case, the Lowell Mills and the Ford assembly line). Sometimes these connections made sense, but many of the times it felt like a stretch. And it really did become a clip show, because they would show clips from the previous episodes in case you forgot about the Lowell Mills or assembly line. In doing this, they spent very little time actually talking about these more recent events, and I feel that I really lost out. I get that they were trying to connect what is happening in our present to the things that we did in the past to get us here, but it could have been done MUCH better.

Overall, I think this series was an underdeveloped effort which could have been an amazing monument to our nation’s history. I think that the History Channel set themselves up with too much of an undertaking and then lost interest as it came to the end. Ultimately, I was not super impressed. Certain episodes were well done but others were not. Too many important events were overlooked and left a bad taste in people’s mouths.

3 out of 5 stars.




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