The West
An eight-part documentary
SBS TV, Sundays 7.30pm (7 in SA) beginning March 2.
Review by Allen Myers
If you watch the first episode of The West, I strongly recommend turning off the sound for the first 10 minutes. That way you can enjoy some stunning natural scenery undisturbed by a pretentious voice-over delivering commonplaces in the super-saccharine tones that US productions reserve for patriotic themes.
Once that painful introduction is past, the series provides a great deal of interesting and informative material, although some viewers may feel that there is more here about the US west (defined as that part of the continental USA between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean) than they really want to know.
After previewing the first two episodes, I was most impressed by the documentary's effort to convey the richness of native American society and the multiple effects of the arrival of Europeans. The first episode, titled "The People", is explicitly devoted to the native Americans, but they are a prominent part of the second episode and, according to the promotional material, others as well.
Even in the limited area of the Americas that was to become the US west, there were a large number of distinctive native societies, speaking quite different languages and encompassing hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and urban dwellers.
The West records the impact of Spanish and later US military attack, and the even more horrific consequences of imported diseases such as smallpox (in the late 18th century, California alone lost three-fourths of its 300,000 native American population). The documentary also examines other impacts, such as the arrival of the horse, on the native peoples — altering methods of production and the relative military strengths of neighbouring tribes.
The second and subsequent episodes are each devoted to a particular time frame, so they lack the coherence of focusing on a single theme. Moreover, each episode is subdivided into five-to-ten-minute segments whose ordering often appears almost random: so, for example, the settlement of Texas by US citizens and the subsequent war of independence from Mexico are interrupted by a segment on a Christian missionary couple in Oregon.
It would no doubt be easy to find other complaints, if only because this series is so ambitious that it is bound to fail in some respects. In the end, however, many viewers may end up remembering it most for some really outstanding nature photography.