The Dust Bowl

The heartbreak here--especially the cases of poor children who died of "dust pneumonia"--is tremendous. [26 Nov 2012, p.45

This beautiful and often moving film resonates even more powerfully with Sandy in our rearview mirror, while Burns' favorite theme--the American character--is drawn here with great clarity.

This series is Burns doing Guthrie, bringing a lifetime of experience and craft to bear on a story of people struggling through hard times. He's picking up a guitar and telling us a story--a great one.

Unlike a lot of TV documentarians, Burns steadfastly refuses to include dramatic re-creations, relying (as he did in "Prohibition," an early-20th-century companion to this) on photographs, grainy video, actors' readings of diaries or news articles, and of course those aforementioned interviews. The last might be the most compelling, providing a bridge from the macro to the micro.

The Dust Bowl sounds like a dry subject, no cheap pun intended, and Burns works hard to humanize it by talking with some of the now-elderly people who made it through.

The Dust Bowl is more like eat-your-vegetables television than some of Burns' other endeavors, namely his last PBS documentary, "Prohibition." But it's still a worthwhile examination of an overlooked chapter from our past that holds plenty of lessons for our future.

It's in dire need of tighter editing, most of all. Yes, the images from the '30s are powerful, but after a while, their power is diminished by repetition.