Excellent but underrated film

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

this PBS series is very BIAS and contains a lot of lies and false information. It sounds like it presents the war from both sides but really it just conforms to much of the media bias about the war and even adds to it.**NOTE** A 1985 video was produced by ACCURACY IN MEDIA to directly correct many of the inaccuracies and false information that were contained within this video series.One example is the massacre of Hue where around 5,000 people were murdered 1968. On this issue "Vietnam: A Television History" uses a communist spokesmen, Hoang Phu Ngoc Tuong, (who is believed to may have been the one who ordered the killings) to explain the deaths as 'the people of Hue so hated those that had tortured them for so long that when the revolution came to Hue the people took actions into their own hands, there was little we could do'. This just shows how completely irresponsible the PBS was as expressed by Pham Ngoc Bich "Hoang Phu Ngoc Tuong may have been the one to order the killings...now years later he is allowed to explain about what happened in Hue, it's equivalent to Himmler talking about the concentration camps." --Anyone who watches this video should definitely also watch Television's Vietnam: The Real Story, and The Media's Impact because that video would break so many of the lies contained in the PBS series.

This is the most balanced and impartial documentary of the Vietnam war i have ever seen. I,m not a war buff, i think war is violence and given the choice as civilized humans i think we should resolve our disagreements peacefully,having said that i am an enthusiastic fan of documentary's about WW1 WW2 Korea and Vietnam.I recently obtained the DVD collectors edition,And from the very first episode i was impressed.The series not only talks about the American involvement but goes back before the French colonial days of Indochina to the very origins of the Vietnamese people,with Balanced perspectives from the Americans the French the Vietnamese and the Cambodians.In my opinion, it is also a Study on the Difference of what the American Government says to the Media publicly and what it does Privately. I see parallels of this Phenomena today with the Iraq War.This is a must see Documentary about Vietnam. I would even Recommend it for History Teachers and classes on American History....

Not a bad television series. However, this program is mainly a political history of the war and not really a military history. True Vietnam War buffs will be disappointed by it's very brief mentioning of the Ia Drang battle, Khesanh siege, etc. There were NO mention of the battles of 1966. Some of the legendary battles of the war such as Dak To and Dong Ha are brushed aside.

Or to CNN's recent "Cold War" series, which was produced by the same creative team who brought the realities of World War II so memorably to television in the 1970's.This documentary series, co-ordinated by "chief correspondent" Stanley Karnow, was definitive. In my opinion, it was even better than Michael Maclear's excellent Canadian-made mini-series, "The Ten Thousand Day War".Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 and now lies in state, just like Lenin or Mao, in his mausoleum in downtown Hanoi, less than a kilometre from the Lenin Monument on Dien Bien Phu Street.Except for Ho, and Richard Nixon, every other major personage connected with the war seems to have co-operated in the production of this series. The producers also obtained interviews from scores of other participants and eyewitnesses. The war is covered thoroughly all the way back to its origins in French Indochina after the First World War when the Versailles peace treaty failed to recognize the aspirations of the Vietnamese.It hardly seems so long since it first aired, but even after 15 years this PBS series holds up extremely well.