Amend: The Fight for America

Invaluable, vital and enlightening.

As as critic I would advise viewers short on time to watch only the first and last episodes. Then, if you like what you see, you can go back and watch parts two through five. If you’re a teacher, though, you may just want to carve out a week or more for your kids to watch and discuss all six hours. It's that good.

Beneath all that polish is substance. Leon and Green succeed at spotlighting under-praised heroes (there’s an especially strong section on Ida B. Wells), while making room for related struggles from feminism to LGBTQ rights to immigration and declining to dumb down the insightful analysis provided by some of our most engaging activists, academics and legal minds.

“Amend” balances enough to keep the viewer perpetually engaged, toggling between various manners of conveying information to move through big American stories, one an episode. It’s perhaps at its best when those stories are about further-flung history.

For a series with such a large scope and often bone-dry subject matter, Amend makes legal history approachable and digestible.

Despite its flaws, Amend: The Fight For America is a very informative docuseries about a piece of our Constitution that is the most misunderstood and overlooked, especially given its importance to how we live our lives in the U.S.

“Amend: The Fight for America” is corny in parts, and serious-minded in others. But a charismatic Will Smith, a few little known facts, and a particularly uplifting episode give this docuseries about the importance of the 14th Amendment a reason to exist.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]