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Every Ken Burns Documentary, Ranked

See where The U.S. and the Holocaust lands in this totally biased and super unscientific evaluation of the legendary filmmaker's career.

By
ken burns
Elaine Chung

Early on during the pandemic, my feel-good shows stopped working. I’d watch The Office with nothing but contempt for Michael, Pam, Jim, and their non-coronavirus-infected lives. It was April, and I would’ve cut out my eyeballs with a dull butter knife if it meant I could travel back in time to live in Scranton, PA, in 2004. In desperation, I searched for a new series. Something that wouldn’t make me miss my non-coronavirus life, but would offer me perspective instead. I needed the TV show version of a curmudgeonly grandpa describing in excruciating detail the many miles he had to walk to get to school each day. That’s when I remembered I have one. We all do. In the blessed form of Ken Burns documentaries.

I am a longtime Ken Burns fan. Before the pandemic set in, I had already seen many of his films. But there were some big ones that I managed to miss. So, to cheer myself up, I committed to watching the rest of them during quarantine, starting with The Vietnam War. As I made my way through the films, my sadness receded. Relaxing into the sweet, predictable pacing of a Ken Burns docuseries eased my mind, and the history presented within the films put the current moment into perspective. Now, I'm now uniquely qualified—in so much as anyone is—to rank the efforts of the legendary documentarian.

Before we dive in, a point of clarification: For the purpose of this consideration, I only included films that Ken Burns directed, meaning the ones he produced didn't make the cut. That’s why you won’t see The West on the list. And while our lockdown days may be over, the Ken Burns catalogue will always be there for you. Ride out whatever you're going through with this totally biased and super unscientific ranking of each and every Ken Burns documentary.

31

The Congress

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A two-hour-long celebration of America’s least effective governing body? No thank you.

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30

Thomas Hart Benton

Here’s what I gleaned from Thomas Hart Benton: 1) Art critics are judge-y. 2) Thomas Hart Benton is from Missouri.

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29

Mark Twain

Burns is a lot of things, but silly isn’t one of them. And Mark Twain is a funny guy. The clashing of their personalities makes for an uneven film. Twain is too dynamic a figure to be hammered into Ken Burns’ mold. If you’re looking for a great take on Twain, read Roy Morris Jr.’s biography on the writer, American Vandal.

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28

Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery

I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but this Ken Burns documentary didn’t have nearly enough photographs. That’s not the filmmakers’ fault. When Lewis and Clark headed out in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, the camera hadn’t been invented yet. In Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, Burns does his best to communicate the trials and tribulations of the duo’s awesome adventure, often relying on stock footage of the places they traveled for visuals. But the lack of photographs and first-person accounts (two major elements of Burns’ trademark style) makes for an uninspiring and incomplete viewing experience.

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27

Huey Long

The only problem with Huey Long is that the dozen or so local folks Burns interviews for the documentary threaten to upstage its central character. In Huey Long, Burns fails to build up Long’s biography before diving into everyday Lousianians' opinions of him. It creates a documentary that, in the end, reveals more about the characters and politics of Louisiana than it does about America’s most divisive wannabe-dictator.

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26

Frank Lloyd Wright

In the opening moments of this Burns biography, the narrator, Edward Hermann, introduces the mercurial architect at its center with all of the flair and enthusiasm of a hungover substitute teacher. “Frank Lloyd Wright broke all the rules,” he monotoned. Like Twain, Wright is too dizzying and defiant a character for the Burns treatment. Insane anecdotes from his life—like the time he borrowed money from his neighbor to get out of debt but instead spent all the money on three grand pianos—get lost when described by the films’ tweedy historians. That being said, if you’ve never seen any of Wright’s designs, this documentary is a great place to start. Sprinkled throughout it are beautiful photos and footage of the architect’s most famous creations.

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25

Defying the Nazis: The Sharps' War

The Unitarian couple at the center of this story deserve a Marvel movie. They literally rescued people from Nazis. I get why Ken Burns wanted to make a documentary about them, but he should’ve handed the reins over to someone with a bigger budget than PBS.

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24

The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God

Here’s the thing: The shakers are fascinating, but Ken Burns’ documentary about them is a snoozefest. It lacks point of view and presents information about the unique religious movement as if it’s a unit in a 3rd grade history class. Here’s hoping he updates the series before the last few living Shakers pass away.

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23

The Civil War

This mega-popular film aged about as well as a glass of milk. It’s epic, to be sure. And the letters from soldiers punctuate the film with a lovely poignancy. But none of that is enough to override the docu-series' central sin: its reliance on Lost Cause history and the expertise of controversial pseudo-historian Shelby Foote. Serious students of history will audibly gasp when they hear Foote claim that the Civil War happened “because we failed to do the thing we have a real genius for, which is compromise.”

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22

The War

In The War, Ken Burns does away with his traditional overview mode of storytelling in exchange for a zoomed-in look at World War II through the lenses of four small towns and the folks who resided in them. Gone are the talking heads and historians who populate Burns’ other films and analyze, often to the benefit of the viewer, the subject matter at hand. Instead, Burns relies on the townspeople to tell the story of the war, and while many of the anecdotes they relay are illuminating, they don’t begin to capture the totality of World War II.

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21

Thomas Jefferson

Here’s what I’ll say about the Thomas Jefferson documentary: It’s better than Ken Burns’ other biographical documentaries. It also, thankfully, includes honest and poignant reflection on Jefferson’s racism.

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20

Jazz

Because I am terrified of incurring the wrath of jazz critics, I’m going to go ahead and agree with them and say that Jazz doesn’t do a great job of capturing jazz. Not all of it at least. The series claims to survey jazz from 1917 up through 2001, but only one of the 10 episodes deals with music made after 1960. It is uneven to a startling degree. The film also fails to include major parts of jazz history, and critics have and will continue to argue over which musicians’ contributions are glossed over and whose are overemphasized. Like all of Burns’ productions, Jazz strives to be comprehensive, and for newbies, it will be. But if you’re a serious consumer of jazz, I recommend skipping this series, both for the sake of yourself and the people who are seated next to you at a future dinner party.

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19

Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio

Is it thrilling to learn about people who were positively bamboozled by the radio? No, it is not. But it’s enjoyable enough. The decision to focus on three primary characters from America’s radio era narrows the documentary to a respectable and digestible 90 minutes. Plus, it is full of fun, fuzzy broadcast sounds from the early days of transmission.

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18

Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip

This is a surprisingly wacky and upbeat documentary about the first cross-country road trip. The protagonist, Dr. Horatio Nelson, is a spirited adventurer. But the real star of this documentary is Bud, the goggle-donning pitbull Nelson adopted somewhere outside Caldwell, Idaho.

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17

The Statue of Liberty

The best part of The Statue of Liberty is when a world-weary James Baldwin reflects on the meaning of liberty. “For a Black American,” Baldwin says, “the Statue of Liberty is simply a very bitter joke.”

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16

Not for Ourselves Alone

Not for Ourselves Alone profiles two important figures from the women’s suffrage movement: Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And if it weren’t for the cloying, fluttery sounds of the fiddle that serves as the film’s score, it’d be a great documentary. It worked in Civil War. It doesn’t work here. Instead, the music undercuts the importance of the story Burns is attempting to tell. Thankfully, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are remarkable figures, and their opposites-attract tale is naturally fascinating, so despite the production at times getting in the way, the documentary is still a worthy and compelling watch. Also, someone should make a bosom-buddy comedy about these two women starring Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig in the titular roles.

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15

The Mayo Clinic: Faith - Hope - Science

The Mayo Clinic: Faith - Hope - Science might be Ken Burns' most personal film. After he was a patient at the famed hospital, Burns began digging into its history and found what he believed to be a quintessentially American story, as inspiring as it is unlikely. The Mayo Clinic was built upon the wreckage of a deadly tornado in Rochester, Minnesota and was willed into existence through a partnership between, of all people, a nun and a physician. Because it’s already a remarkable story, Burns doesn’t have to do much to improve it. The documentary gets the typical Burns treatment but is punched up by narration from Tom Hanks, current photographs and footage of the mighty hospital, and celebrity cameos from Tom Brokaw and the Dalai Lama (both labeled simply as “patients” in the film).

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14

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

“Holy shit, Jack Johnson is a badass!” That was my reaction after watching Unforgivable Blackness earlier this summer. The first Black heavyweight boxing champion, Johnson is given due consideration by Burns and the series’ stable of lively talking heads in this two-part biography. It’s a thoughtful and pensive look at a person who lived out loud despite a racist nation’s desperate attempts to silence him.

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13

The National Parks: America's Best Idea

If Burns had cut this series off after Episode Four, it would have easily cracked the top 10 of this list. But the problem is, once the hard work of setting up the parks is done and John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt fade from the narrative, the series loses its thrust and you still have two more episodes to go. Though there is so much gorgeous, high-definition footage in this film, which is a welcome departure from the typical zoom-in-and-pan treatment that Burns relied on in many of his early films.

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12

Benjamin Franklin

Burns' newest documentary (this one clocking in at a modest four hours) attempts an appraisal of a Founding Father who defied categorization. Benjamin Franklin was a printer, publisher, writer, inventor, scientist, diplomat, and civic leader—how should we understand a man who contained such multitudes? This even-handed project considers not just his multitudes, but also his contradictions. Burns takes the measure of Franklin's accomplishments, considering his contributions to the American experiment, while also taking a hard look at his shortcomings, like owning slaves and dispossessing his Indigenous neighbors. From virtue to vice, Benjamin Franklin is an informative look at a singular figure in American history.

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