Ken Burns

Let's raise a toast to Ken Burns, and not just any old swill. How about a sidecar? Or an aviation? Or a clover club? Or any of dozens of elegant cocktails that were popular and widely consumed in the 1920s, when alcohol was illegal in the United States and the country, nevertheless, became the biggest importer of cocktail shakers in the world. Burns and his collaborator, Lynn Novick, have held the reins taut and produced a rarity for them - a historical documentary that sticks to the point and runs at a reasonable length.

SURE, THAT CUP of bathtub gin might be laced with deadly wood alcohol. But bouts of blindness, leg amputation and sudden death notwithstanding, boozing during the Prohibition - at least as depicted in the new Ken Burns three-part docu-film airing on PBS next week - sure looks fun. The dandies in tuxedos, the girls in flapper dresses dancing to the raucous music of jazz bands as gallons of lager sprays from speakeasy faucets - wow, the...

Down in New Orleans, back before the turn of the century - the 20th century - a bandleader named Buddy Bolden was becoming one of the grandfathers of jazz. He'd play hot licks in the evening, and then after midnight, he'd turn down the heat, and the dancers would slow, because everybody wanted it to last all night. In his latest documentary, Jazz, which starts tomorrow night, Ken Burns outdoes Buddy Bolden, with a slow, if sometimes brilliant, traipse down memory lane that makes "all night" seem like a heartbeat.

My father was a Thomas Jefferson nut. One of my favorite legacies from him is his framed photograph of Jefferson's will, a photograph no one was supposed to be able to take. He browbeat the security guards at the University of Virginia library so long one day about 30 years ago that they opened up a vault and pushed us in so that he could take his clandestine snapshot, and they could get rid of him. Ken Burns is also a Jefferson nut. Three years ago, as he was finishing his epic Baseball maxi-series, he showed me the backyard of his Walpole, N.H., studio/house.

The presence of Ken Burns' father looms large in his son's latest PBS epic. But viewers won't know it. An unidentified photograph of Lt. Robert Kyle Burns Jr. is the first and last image in The War , a 15-hour documentary series about World War II. It launches Sept. 23. Burns hadn't planned to use the photo, a beloved possession since college. After all, his dad had spoken to him about the war only once before his death in 2001. But as War began taking shape as personal reminiscences of vets from various American towns, Burns decided the image "would be a quiet way to honor my father," he said during a recent visit here.

These are the words of Bill "Spaceman" Lee about the effect of the changes that took place in the '70s in major-league baseball that have brought us to this sad day: "The owners made money. The players made money. The only people that got hurt were the American public, the fans, the integrity of baseball and eventually the planet Earth. " Lee, a Red Sox hurler whose best pitch was the oddball, is one of, oh, about a million players, owners, managers, fans, hot dog salesmen, writers, broadcasters and paleontologists who talk baseball and related matters in Baseball, which starts tonight on PBS. The film is from Ken Burns, the man who made The Civil War. It is much longer than that film, which was PBS's biggest hit. Baseball, which sets out to detail the history of the game - and supposedly much more - is almost as long as the Civil War itself.

The presence of Ken Burns' father looms large in his son's latest PBS epic. But viewers won't know it. An unidentified photograph of Lt. Robert Kyle Burns Jr. is the first and last image in The War, a 15-hour documentary series about World War II. It launches Sept. 23. Burns hadn't planned to use the photo, a beloved possession since college. After all, his dad had spoken to him about the war only once before his death in 2001. But as War began taking shape as personal reminiscences of vets from various American towns, Burns decided the image "would be a quiet way to honor my father," he said during a recent visit here.

Everyone wanted to crown Huey Long, the populist demagogue who was governor of Louisiana during the '20s and its U.S. senator during the '30s. Repeatedly charged with bribery and corruption but never convicted by state prosecutors he had handpicked, Long crowned himself the Kingfish and became a bayou demigod for building bridges and paving roads, and for bringing Louisiana out of feudalism. And into futilism. His enemies dubbed him variously "Hooey XIV, Emperor of Louisiana," and "the dictator who makes Americans regret the Louisiana Purchase.

Ken Burns, whose PBS show "The Civil War" was only slightly longer than the real thing, plans to make a similar documentary about baseball, which should surprise no one. Baseball, as Burns noted, is a lot like the Civil War. Fans of baseball and of the Civil War share many of same qualities, most of them bad. They tend to be obsessive, trivia-mad and memorabilia-prone. They are people who ascribe all kinds of mythic qualities to the war and the sport, people who claim you can't understand America unless you understand the Civil War or baseball.

If it weren't for Fox's Glee , there would be little excitement in a fall TV season whose biggest promise is five prime-time hours a week of the soporific stylings of Jay Leno. While lacking creative dazzle, they may stimulate the late-news ratings, if local stations tone down the shows so snoozing Leno fans don't awake to turn the TV off before Conan comes on. There is some news this season: After years among the missing, the sitcom makes a tentative return. Nobody's doing backflips about them, but half of the best new series are sitcoms.

Let's raise a toast to Ken Burns, and not just any old swill. How about a sidecar? Or an aviation? Or a clover club? Or any of dozens of elegant cocktails that were popular and widely consumed in the 1920s, when alcohol was illegal in the United States and the country, nevertheless, became the biggest importer of cocktail shakers in the world. Burns and his collaborator, Lynn Novick, have held the reins taut and produced a rarity for them - a historical documentary that sticks to the point and runs at a reasonable length.

* PROHIBITION. 8 p.m. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, WHYY. * BOARDWALK EMPIRE. 9 p.m. Sundays, HBO.   WE DIDN'T really need Ken Burns to tell us there was nothing dry about Prohibition. Not with HBO's "Boardwalk Empire" already partying on for its second season in a long-ago Atlantic City. But it's nice to be sure. And there's nothing like a documentary miniseries from Burns and his producing partner, Lynn Novick, to make it clear that HBO hasn't cornered the market on colorful characters when it comes to telling the story of the 18th Amendment, one of history's better illustrations of the law of unintended consequences.

SURE, THAT CUP of bathtub gin might be laced with deadly wood alcohol. But bouts of blindness, leg amputation and sudden death notwithstanding, boozing during the Prohibition - at least as depicted in the new Ken Burns three-part docu-film airing on PBS next week - sure looks fun. The dandies in tuxedos, the girls in flapper dresses dancing to the raucous music of jazz bands as gallons of lager sprays from speakeasy faucets - wow, the...

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns isn't one to lend his name to colognes, designer jeans, spaghetti sauce or any of the other entrapments that sometimes come with fame. But when Tauck, a leading tour company for guided land journeys and small-ship cruises, approached Burns and his partner, Dayton Duncan, about teaming up on a series of events and tours themed on American culture and history, he happily said yes. That's how Ken Burns American Journeys came to be. "We're in the business of history.

I'VE HAD a love-hate relationship with public broadcasting my whole life. Sure, Big Bird and Grover helped raise my kids. But so did Homer and Marge Simpson. (Only time will tell how that turns out.) I admire NPR but can't listen to it when I'm driving long distances because the voices put me to sleep. Fifteen years ago, when the BBC version of "Pride and Prejudice" with Colin Firth created a sensation on A&E, I wondered if cable might not eventually fill the niche occupied by "educational TV. " I still watched PBS from time to time - on and off the clock - but I could see why some people who had the History Channel might no longer see the point of "The American Experience.

Of the estimated 16 million men and women who served in the U.S. military in World War II, one was a 17-year-old Marine named Sidney Phillips, who enlisted the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, fought in the Pacific and eventually came home and became a doctor, little dreaming that decades later he'd be part of not one, but two major television projects on the war. Starting Sunday, Ashton Holmes will play Phillips as a baby-faced young private...

Ken Burns has spent the last three decades carrying America's past down from the attic, blowing the dust off old photos and forgotten letters to find out just one thing: Who are we? The answer is endless, and Burns has uncovered parts of it in celebrated PBS documentaries on the Civil War and World War II, on baseball and jazz, on Jack Johnson and Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson and Frank Lloyd Wright. Now he's found another piece, which he shares in his latest documentary, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, a stunningly beautiful 12-hour, six-part miniseries that begins at 8 tonight on WHYY TV12.

If it weren't for Fox's Glee , there would be little excitement in a fall TV season whose biggest promise is five prime-time hours a week of the soporific stylings of Jay Leno. While lacking creative dazzle, they may stimulate the late-news ratings, if local stations tone down the shows so snoozing Leno fans don't awake to turn the TV off before Conan comes on. There is some news this season: After years among the missing, the sitcom makes a tentative return. Nobody's doing backflips about them, but half of the best new series are sitcoms.

There's an application on my computer called the "Ken Burns effect. " It can dress up my picture slideshows by inserting pans and zooms, adding a feeling of motion to the still images. It mimics the technique filmmaker Ken Burns uses to hold the attention of viewers in his epic documentaries, which rely heavily on historic paintings and photos. As a Latina, I've unfortunately run across another kind of Ken Burns effect - one that leaves Hispanics largely invisible in those documentaries.

A muffled clap and a whispered "cheerio" are about all you'll get this fall from anybody who has seen the TV networks' new series. The landscape's as uninspiring as it has been in years, especially in contrast to last season's surfeit of surefire winners, most of which, sadly and strangely, dried up and blew away. Still, there are a few new series worth waiting for, and some worthy returnees that merit mention in a season preview. Following in the footsteps of Heroes, fantasy is big. Two notable new series, Chuck and Reaper , feature lovable slackers battling bad guys, real and imagined.