Ken Burns’ ‘American Revolution’ Review: History Maestro Delivers Greatest Hits Plus More In Timely PBS Series

In many ways, Ken Burns is the Van Halen of historical documentary directors.

Before you jump, hear me out.

Watching the acclaimed filmmaker’s upcoming The American Revolution with some apprehension, it became clear that the six-part PBS series is the soulmate to Van Halen’s seminal but commercially disappointing 1981 album Fair Warning – in a very good way.

Debuting Sunday on PBS stations, the often-languorous American Revolution has all the slow pans across paintings and maps that appear in all of Burns’ work from 1981’s Brooklyn Bridge to The Civil War, 2009’s National Parksbiographies of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, 2011’s Prohibition2017’s The Vietnam War and last year’s Leonardo da Vinci.

Along with Burns and his and co-directors David P. Schmidt and Sarah Botstein’s use of evocative locations and out-of-focus re-creations, American Revolution has narration by Peter Coyote, and high-definition but measured sit-down interviews with historians.

With techniques made famous and mockingly infamous by The Civil War and subsequent Burns projects, American Revolution uses letters and meticulous examination of the time to represent ordinary men and women in extraordinary situations. Like so many Burns projects, there are those celebrity voice-overs from the likes of Samuel L. Jackson, Meryl Streep Tom Hanks, Paul Giamatti (playing, you guessed it, John Adams), poet Amanda Gorman, Hamilton vet Jonathan Groff (not playing who you think) and Michael Keaton to name but a handful.

Yes, there is a lot of the Burns tried and true in American Revolution. Add to that the fact that you know how it all turns out and, even as a student of American history, you get my trepidation going in.

So, let’s get back to that Van Halen comparison for a second.

Similar to the fourth album release from the David Lee Roth-fronted rockers, Burns’ take on the war that created America does stick to the decades-old methods and formats that have worked for him since The Civil War exploded on the small screen in 1990. When Fair Warning came out in 1981, some critics noted that it too had all the hallmarks of previous Van Halen albums and no real evolution.

Yet, some also acknowledged “Eddie [Van Halen]’s latest sound effects” and the submerged introduction of synthesizers to the band’s palate. The latter revelation was a game changer obvious to anyone who over the years followed the band after its synth-heavy blockbuster 1984.

In that context, when it comes to the quietly ambitious American Revolutionyou don’t need to look too hard to notice something different going on under the surface from previous Burns works. Let’s put it this way: You don’t need to look too hard at a calendar, your local defunded PBS station or much else to see 2025 is almost as far away from 1990 as it is from 1981 or 1776.

The world has changed, the medium has changed, America has changed, and the stakes have definitely changed.

On the most integral level, the past decade in our frayed Republic has seen a domination by MAGA madness and the largely toxic discharge of social media. So, to put it mildly, there’s a lot of blood in the water in the culture and our sense of our collective history.

Having spent most of the past decade making American Revolution, Ken Burns clearly knows that. To that, like Van Halen’s Fair Warning, there is an urgent undercurrent that wasn’t in Burns’ previous films. Something is stirring in him, and in us — and the saga of the creation of this often unruly nation has something to tell us about what is happening now.

How that manifests itself for viewers likely depends on your own patience with the long series, and your voter-registration card.

Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum or regarding Flat Earthers, there is no denying the inviolable sense of time and place in American Revolution. It’s as if Eddie Van Halen, without telling anyone, added an extra two strings on his guitar to reverberate through his Marshall stack, and the ages.

This is not the kind of American history MAGA loyalists like, and not just for the reasons you might think. To that, with the almost last breath of the Van Halen analogy, part of the success of The American Revolution is how it is loud and proud in a quiet way.

For another thing that perhaps won’t land well with MAGA crowd: it’s also complicated and quite diverse.

Which is to say, if you are looking for the Founding Fathers and their friends to be the guys in the white hats, you might want look somewhere else. For instance, not all the good guys are white (the David Oyelowo-voiced Olaudah Equiano is one example), and not all of them are guys (the Maya Hawke voice of Betsy Ambler).

Burns’ American Revolution also burns to a crisp the prevailing notion of the Great Man of American History.

Sorry George Washington and Alexander Hamilton fans, but there’s a lot more going on in the taverns where much of it happens than those infectious Lin-Manuel Miranda tunes tell you. Opening up the aperture, American Revolution often stares straight into the ugly and unsavory realpolitik of nation creation, with broken and bumbling men and women, well-meaning or not, stumbling into an idea of a better tomorrow.

Between the incomprehensibility and the incompetence on the side of the British Empire and the side of the American rebels that Burns outlines in American Revolution, the chaotic colonists’ attempts to free themselves from the rule of George III could have had all the hallmarks of a prequel to The Poseidon Adventurewith more boats.

As the losses and bodies pile up for the rebels (I’m not saying Battle of Long Island, but I’m saying Battle of Long Island), you many even wonder why they just didn’t give up to fight another day — you won’t be alone. That feeling and, dare I say it without seeming too fancy, the contemporary subtext, is part of Burns and gang’s genius with American Revolution.

You want to look away because it is almost painful to be so deep in the muck, and you know how it ends, so why must we be stuck in this muck? Can’t we get to the glories of Independence Hall? Yet despite those typical barriers to belief, you should keep watching.

Why?

Truth be told, with all the mishaps (to put it politely) and egos among the deeply divided rebels, as the episodes move along something delightful and insightful emerges over the talking-head historians, history lessons and trivia.

Even in this dank decade for American democracy that we are living in now, the recently neglected sense of the near universal inspiration created by our centuries-old revolution springs to life anew. Turns out, the tale of the wild American dogs chasing the Brits back over the pond and beginning one of the greatest leaps of faith in human history still makes for pretty damn good history, on the small screen and otherwise.

Or, in the words of Van Halen: “Change, nothin’ stays the same/Unchained, and ya hit the ground runnin’.

You also get some unconventional wisdom from American Revolution amidst stories you’ve heard a million times before — great stuff to show off at your kids’ school recitals and soccer practices.

The motivations behind Benedict Arnold’s turn to the British side, for example, actually turns out to be much more about the heart and of the divine than they ever taught us in school. Gen. Arnold (voiced by Keaton, who you are kinda dying for him to say “I am a traitor” in a “I am Batman” way) was all too human, it seems.

To be honest, especially when it comes to the American rebels partnering with the French and their despotic monarchy against George III and the Redcoats, Arnold’s betrayal of Washington (the latter voiced by the once George W. Bush-portraying Josh Brolin) and alliance with the British makes some degree of sense, at least from his perspective.

Which is to say, if you are interested in real people, real battles (literal, social, racial and political) and the messiness of what 1776 was and is all about, American Revolution is a tome well worth sticking with until the end – even though we all know how it ends.

Or do we?

To paraphrase that great American poet and hopefully future Ken Burns subject Gil Scott-Heron: The American Revolution will be televised, and it will be well worth watching.