Before my trial STARZ subscription runs out towards the end of the month, I thought I'd fire up this little miniseries that I thought I may have watched back in the late seventies on TV.
Around the time of Roots, Winds of War, North and South, and Shogun, basically the Age of the Great TV miniseries, came this one based on the massive James Michener novel Centennial focusing on the American Great Plains and primarily the land and the peoples inhabiting what would eventually become Colorado.
What I wasn't prepared for, was the incredible amount of footage that this miniseries was comprised of. Each episode averages, of course since it's a premium subscription service, without commercials, a bit over an hour and three quarters each. So it's roughly 12 episodes and 24 to 26 hours of non-stop action. Right now I'm halfway through, just about to start episode 7, and in the story so far we've made our way from roughly the 1790s to the 1870s. According to the description, in the next six episodes we still have another hundred years to go! This miniseries makes Roots almost look like a halftime show.
I think back in the day, I may have seen part of the first episode, but I don't remember much else. My suspicion is we watched it as a family and my father probably didn't really get into it or there was probably something on another network that he favored more so that's why we didn't continue watching it. I loved history and I'm sure I would have wanted to continue, but I would have only been 14 at the time and my father controlled that remote control. Oh who am I kidding, we didn't have a remote control, us kids were the remote control. He made us go up to the TV and turn the dial. That was the remote control.
I read on Wikipedia that this was the most expensive television program ever. I believe it said it cost 50 million dollars. And I think that was in 1978. Let me just check how expensive that was. Um, to give you an idea, Star Wars, which came out just the year before, cost $11 million!
And I'll tell you, this show looks gorgeous. Even though it's not in HD, and it's in a 4:3 ratio, the costuming and background scenery is certainly eye-catching and you can tell that they made quite the effort in making it look authentic and beautiful.
And so far, considering the time that this was broadcast, that is, before the modern Age of Wokeness, I find the depiction of things like racism, genocide, and the duplicitous if not outright corrupt and disingenuous policies of the US government particularly in regards to its handling of Indian Affairs during the middle of the 19th century in the Great Plains to be quite honest and frank. The story calls out and bears witness to the evils of certain crimes against humanity at the hands of the greedy, the bigoted, the ignorant, and the power hungry.
Yet I also find it funny that at the beginning of each episode, there's a modern placard cautioning this:
First of all, there's the rating TV-PG, which may be a carryover from how they rated it back in the 70s. I don't know if they would rate it as such today since it pretty unabashedly shows bloodshed, including outright murder, lynching, and shooting babies. But there's no nudity so I guess as long as you don't show titties on TV the kiddies won't be scarred.
But the really funny part is Outdated Cultural Depiction.
When I first saw this, I thought, oh lordy are we going to see Zippity Doo Dah slaves smiling wide and just loving their Massas like nobody's business? Or, since I guess it's mostly centered around the American Indians, is it going to be extremely stereotypical of the old 1950s style Indian savages scalping, raiding wagon trains, and basically being nothing more than vagabonds to the advancing Pure White God-fearing White, righteous, White, civilization-loving, White, I think you know where we're going.
But it hasn't been like that. They even talked about the scam that was the slander of what scalping really was, in that it was taught to the Indians by the white man and perpetuated by white men from the 18th and throughout the 19th centuries. They showed that raids by Indians on white settlers were mainly propagated by renegades and not the official policy of tribal leaders. They showed the truth of the lies and backstabbing at the hands of the Great White Fathers and their so-called emissaries pretending to treat Indians as if they were "nations" yet actually propping up a system which was geared towards everything from forced assimilation, impressed apartheid to outright genocide.
So I'm not sure what STARZ is warning us viewers about when they say Outdated Cultural Depiction.
I know that there are other, much more recently-produced, quasi-historical dramas on this channel that depict a fantasy version of an imagined past which retcons racism altogether, placing, for instance, persons of color within lofty and noble positions amongst the courts of Renaissance England and France. And that's all well and good, but it has to be remembered that no matter what one may wish today, that that is, after all, just fantasy. In this show, we do see one of the managing partners commanding a cattle ride from Texas through the Southwest and up to Colorado is a free Black man in a period of time just after the Civil War. And historically that does fit since there are records showing that there were Black cowboys and since the cowboy ethos was one of merit above all, it isn't a flight of fancy where one could imagine a Black man rising in the ranks to a leader.
But, as I said, I'm only halfway through. And we know that just because the Civil War has ended, racism in America is far from over. For the Black man, or the Red man. (By the way, would it be appropriate to capitalize "red" when talking about Indians? Er, I don't think so. I don't think "red" is appropriate at all.)
So I'll throw an EDIT on here as needed as I wade on through the rest of this EPIC SAGA. I kind of got to get back to it in a timely enough fashion. I only have to the end of the month. After this, I'm going to feel like I aged like a whoring bigamist Canuck Hab (with a battery on his shoulder), or an escaped murderer Scot (sans kimono), or a fat man with a bad German accent polishing silver in every scene (and certainly NOT being secretly gay IRL) or a stab-happy crazed half-breed, or a Indian woman named for pottery who let her mother die in the snow, or an Indian Chief who chose a fancy stovepipe hat over his people, or sombrero-wearing Mexican cook named Nacho Gomez, or....
Oh, I guess I get what they mean by Outdated Cultural Depiction.
EDIT: So I just completed this series today September 10th and before I read any reviews, I want to give my own blanket review.
While I still maintain it was a great show, I will emphatically say that Centennial should have stopped at a true Centennial.
What I mean is, the story started around 1780 or so and it should have ended in the 1880s...100 years.
The two or maybe three episodes of this miniseries that dealt with the time after that was pretty much all downhill. The whole business of the Wendells and their scams and the murder (while nearly almost literally doing an old fashioned twisty mustache move) and then the whole April September romance at the ranch, the dead end story of Levi's daughter "breaking bad" and being bought off so she could leave town to never be heard from ever again, the whole story of Nacho's friend coming to Centennial only to get arrested on a day trip to Denver and sent to prison for 6 years and then the whole subplot of, now that the Indians are out of the picture, the Mexicans are the new target of the racists in town.
I mean, what with all the late 70s early '80s soon to be ever so popular Dallas/Dynasty prime time soap opera plots and music cues, sinister glances and so forth, I mean, get real! What was a great historical epic miniseries in the vein of Roots divulged into a proto Falcon Crest, for crying out loud.
And don't get me started with the whole last episode set in the contemporary 1970s with Professor Andy Griffith channeling both his famous TV characters of Sheriff Taylor and Matlock to get to the bottom of the mysterious pit in the ground with the human remains which he just pockets and debates on how he's going to use this as potential political fodder, not a bit skeeved out that it's a human bone and not a bit concerned that maybe there are ancestors of the person that was killed since it was only 90 years ago and maybe they'd be interested to know that their missing great grandfather's body was finally found after all these years. Mmm, mmm! Even old bones are good on a Ritz!
