If Memory Serves, Burns's Jazz series got a lot of flack when it first aired. Mark's complaints sound similar.

What I've seen of the "New York" series was astonishing. Damn, did that city go through several kinds of hell. There are whole great bleeding epochs of racial and ethnic pain buried under that pavement, and I wouldn't have known about it if it weren't for the Burns film.

I watched "The Civil War" when it was first aired. Damn long, exhausting, and at times made me feel like I'd been kicked in the stomach. I couldn't bear to watch it again until this summer. But I'm not sorry I watched it either time. I wouldn't have known about Joshua Chamberlin otherwise. Wotta guy.