Today, I saw an ad for South African satellite TV. The message "Learn MORE! With dsTV! See our documentary channels" was accompanied by clips of tanks shooting, cranes lifting, and airplanes taking off, which undoubtedly have great educational value. So I decided I would watch a documentary from each. I chose subjects that I was knowledgeable about, just to see how bad they did it. First off was Speed Machines on Discovery. Awful. With comments like "WITH THE FIVE HUNDRED HORSEPOWER ENGINE, IT IS FIVE TIMES AS POWERFUL AS A NORMAL CAR. FIVE TIMES", generic heavy metal music, stupid interviews, and CGI of a spinnings sports carin 3D accompanied by more stupid commentary. There is nothing informative about Speed Machines, except irrelevancies, performance figures taken out of context, and footage of "cars in action". The shittiness is compounded by a low budget and a target audience of single-digit age, it seems. Next up was National Geographic and some program about Building the Ultimate: Bikes. This shows premise decapitates any hope that it could be worthwhile, because there is no such thing as an Ultimate Bike. The producers did not even bother to put it in ANY context. Last was a show about the unsolved mysteries of the Titanic on the History Channel. What unsolved mystery? The ship was hit by an iceberg and sank. There is no mystery. My conclusion is that the three aforementioned channels actually negate healthy knowledge and should die in a fire.
My impression of documentaries are that if you have average or more knowledge about the subject, the documentaries tend to be obvious, simplistic or sometimes just silly. An impression which is strenghtened by the fact that most documentaries I find enjoyable are about subjects I have little or no knowledge about.
I agree with Varyag. Most documentaries arent that good on factual side. Therefore its usually better just take them as an entertainment. Sure there are some really bad documentaries that wont even entertain anyone. I have found one documentary series which is head and shoulders above others: The World at War Despite being over 30 years old, it still is best. You can easily see that they have used time, money and skill when doing that, it is so much better than those '2 episodes per day, $5000 per episode' -mocumentaries that History Channel, Discovery Channel and National Geographics Channel show us. I think BBC channel show better documentaries, atleast those I've seen are generally better than those from Discovery or History Channel.
I second that... Lawrence Olivier's firm and 100% British voice goes no small way towards making the World at War an excellent documentary... It also manages to come across as very balanced and non-biased, and with possibly the most original footage of any such series... Overall I find the History Channel quite good... With the exception of a few shows... If you ever get the chance to watch the series "Last Days of WW2" a fun game to try is to count how many times they say "freedom" in each sentence... It isn't fighting, its "defending freedom" It isn't artillery, its "freedoms thunder" It isn't invading Poland, its "destroying freedom" It isn't beer, its "liquid freedom" The list goes on...
