Ken Burns' 'The American Revolution' is profoundly moving

The Battle of Long Island took place on Long Island, but (as most Long Islanders know) not exactly. On Aug. 27, 1776, just weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence on Aug. 2, the combatants clashed over a series of hills and swales, from Gowanus to Boerum Hill, from Brooklyn Heights to Fort Greene. The outcome was in doubt. The sweeping Ken Burns series launching Sunday (8 p.m., WNET/13) that charts this tumult is not.

Forming the set piece for the third episode of PBS' "The American Revolution" — one of the TV events of the fall season — the war's first and ultimately largest battle was a debacle for George Washington and his Continental Army. However, you, the viewer, learn this long before the father of a certain country does.

On screen, a thin red line threads up what was then known as Jamaica Pass — now Eastern Parkway — as 10,000 British troops come up from behind a few hundred oblivious Colonial troops who had secured a high rise (now The Green-Wood Cemetery). The trap sprung, they are routed while one of the greatest experiments in world history is nearly routed along with them. (It's OK — we won, eventually.)

Among the singular pleasures of any Burns film — not including those soulful fiddle lines, or Peter Coyote's just as soulful narration — is the surprise of discovery. We know this epic battle turned out poorly, but do we really? After all, 250 years is an awfully long time. We've had some other history to catch up with in the meantime.

But this artfully rendered scene brings us all up to speed in an instant, while reminding us that history isn't inevitable but just is. Had that thin red line squiggled off in a different direction, our world might also be a different place. Another debacle may have awaited. Washington might never have escaped with his army across the East River to fight another day.

'OUR FIRST CIVIL WAR'

"The American Revolution" trifles with none of these "what ifs" — there were lots of those, as this film establishes — because it's far too busy with the "what-actually-happens." Even 12 hours hardly seems enough for that monumental task.

"There's a kind of faded lithograph quality that many Americans have" of the war, said Rick Atkinson — one of the many star historians who appear on screen — in a Zoom interview. "Looking back, there's a sepia tint to it. But it was not like that at all. It is utterly brutal because it's our first civil war, and has all the internecine brutality that every civil war has."

 "Revolution" loses the sepia tint, but not the violence, much abetted by chaos and the law of unintended consequences. The Patriots ultimately carry the day, almost in spite of themselves, or Washington's own distressingly frequent miscues on the battlefield. That field of action sprawls across a thousand miles of wilderness, with battles popping up on this vast undifferentiated canvas like supernovae against the blackness of space. Pandemonium is the operating principal at first. But as another star historian, Joseph Ellis, explains, in the aftermath of another fiasco (the Battle of Germantown), "Washington gains a basic insight [which is] that he doesn't have to win. He only has to not lose."

A world-changing insight on his part, except that just about a month after the Battle of Long Island, Gens. Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold prevailed at the Battle of Saratoga. The stunning victory was an inversion of all that had gone wrong at the Battle of Long Island, and also brought the French into the fight. Only then was the ultimate outcome assured. Winning had its advantages too.

MANY YEARS IN THE MAKING

What a story. What a thrilling, propulsive, heart-pounding made-for-TV one. What in heaven's name took TV's master of such tales so long to get around to this one?

While few TV series can rightfully claim "landmark" status, "The American Revolution" just might be that rare exception. It lands 35 years after another Burns landmark, "The Civil War," which single-handedly reversed pop culture's idea about just how popular a public TV series could possibly be (40 million viewers over 11 hours.) And yet other antecedents go further back, to Burns' "Brooklyn Bridge" (1981) and "The Statue of Liberty" (1985). Burns and Florentine Films have spent their entire history covering history.

Something was missing, but at long last, no more. So why the long delay? There's a story here of happenstance, opportunity and appetite. After "The Civil War," Burns and his longtime working partners, Lynn Novick and Geoffrey Ward, had decided they were done with war. While a huge success, the work had nevertheless been grueling and — probably on some level they hadn't yet come to terms with — dispiriting.

Instead, "Baseball" (1994), "The West" (1996) and "Jazz" (2001) followed. Their 15-hour film on World War II wouldn't arrive until 2007, during the second Gulf War. But that was largely the work of another colleague, Sarah Botstein, who had joined Florentine in 1997. Botstein has since become Florentine's war specialist. She also directed "Vietnam" (2017) and "The U.S. and the Holocaust" (2022). Along with David Schmidt, she is showrunner on "The American Revolution."

In a Zoom interview, Botstein says, "When we were working on World War II, which was the second film I'd ever worked on with Ken, we decided to make Vietnam, and while we were finishing Vietnam, in December of 2015, Ken — for a variety of reasons — had the revelation that he felt ready to do the American Revolution." Leading those reasons was of course the 250th anniversary which falls next year. The producers broke ground on the production 10 years ago.

Challenges awaited — critical ones which have dissuaded other filmmakers over the years, says Botstein, with a handful of exceptions, including PBS' "Liberty! The American Revolution" in 1997, and the History Channel's 13-part "The Revolution" in 2006-07. Atkinson says that "there's no B-roll, no photographs. Other events [also] happened 250 years ago. So you take everything that you think historiography teaches you with a grain of salt. That's been a big challenge for [Botstein and Schmidt] for 10 years."

Botstein says "one of the reasons lots of historical documentary filmmakers don't do the [entire] revolution is because it is pre-photography, and it's just artistically a completely different beast."

She adds that "it's so far away in our memory [and] draped in so much mythology — as all wars are — that it's a hard one to get at."

UPDATING THE PLAYBOOK

To get at this one, Botstein and Schmidt updated "The Civil War" playbook. Philosophically and thematically, the same general idea applies here too — that wars aren't fought by famous generals, but by the unheralded, and for the most part, the nameless. They filled not just the ranks of the patriots, but of the loyalists, the British, and French, the enslaved, and the American Indians, most notably the Five Nations of the Iroquois, who were so pivotal to the war's outcome.

Along with surviving letters and journals, Botstein and Schmidt have explored the nuances of this part of the history with a who's who of historians, including Ellis ("American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson") and Atkinson — an acclaimed military historian whose World War II "Liberation" trilogy was a bestseller and who recently published the second volume of his planned American Revolution trilogy.

Others include Gordon S. Wood, arguably the leading historian of the entire war; Alan Taylor, a specialist of its so-called microhistory; and Annette Gordon-Reed, who produced the groundbreaking (and headline-grabbing) scholarship on Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemmings. Others here talk about the Hessians' role (Friederike Baer), the Iroquois nation (Ned Blackhawk, Maggie Blackhawk), the British homefront (Stephen Conway), the impact of slavery and the enslaved (Chistopher Brown, Vincent Brown), and Thomas Jefferson, that most complicated of Founding Fathers (Jane Kamensky, head of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation).

'A DYNAMIC, FLOWING STORY'

But Botstein and Schmidt haven't settled on some passive overview of the war, with talking head followed by talking head, but instead a dynamic, flowing story. They've made extensive use of drones to gather footage of contested terrain. And from the ground up, they've gathered low-angle shots of legs dressed in breeches, stockings and gaiters. You never see the faces of these reenacted soldiers but you do see some of their adversaries — brambles, gorse wood and (above all) mud.

To call this whole production "magisterial" or "magnificent" would be to trivialize the words, and the production. More specifically, it's exciting and — at moments when least expected — profoundly moving.

Atkinson explains why: "I say as much in the film, and I've certainly said as much out shilling the book ['The Fate of the Day'] which is that we're beneficiary of an enlightened political heritage handed down to us from that Revolutionary generation. That includes personal liberties and strictures on how to divide power and keep it from concentrating in the hands of autocrats. We can't allow that to slip away, or be taken away — or be oblivious to this priceless gift, or to the hundreds of thousands who've given their lives to affirm and sustain it over the past 250 years."