Tuesday, February 19, 2008

PBS show on "The Mormons"

Today was my day off like usual each week and it was nice to relax. My kids watch some of PBS shows and during the weekend I saw that a show called "The Mormons" was coming on later on PBS. I decided to go ahead and Tivo it to watch it later. It was 2 hours long and I watched it today. It started okay with the early history, but after only 5 minutes they already were badmouthing the church. I found out that it was Part 1 of 2 in this 2 hours. The main people that they had on the documentary it seemed were Historians and people not in the church. If you look up the program on http://www.pbs.org/mormons/ it actually lists some people and they have more nonmembers or excommunicated members than members commenting. And when the members did comment it was short, while the excommunicated and nonmembers were given more time. It was apparent that they were trying to focus on the outskirts and contriversal issues than on what the people and truths were. Polygamy seemed to be the focus for 45 minutes of the 2 hour show. Also the Mountain Meadows Massacre filled another at least 15 minutes of the show. I was very disappointed in the show. You can watch it online on the link I have provided. I haven't seen Part 2 yet, but probably will soon.

4 comments:

Scott said...

I agree; it definitely focused on all of the controversial stuff, nothing really about the core essence of the Church. I'm pretty sure they gave more time to people that were excommunicated than actual members. And think about that for a second... How many excommunicated members of the Church are out there vs how many active members are there? Really, they must have sent out invitations to nearly half of them to get so many. Now there are a lot of inactive members, but I'll bet you well over a large majority of them still believe the Church is true. So even though they didn't really give a fair view of the Church, at least no one can accuse PBS of not trying hard enough. It's just they tried hard to be controversial, not unbiased.

I did like seeing some of the BYU religion professors on there though. It's always cool to see someone you know on TV.

Scott said...

By the way, thanks for changing your blog layout, I couldn't stand how bad the old one was. This is so much nicer.

Bill said...

Appreciated your comments, we also recorded it but have not watched it, don’t know now if it is worth the time. Our South Stake conferences broadcast live the Morning before Pres. Hinckley died was a lot about correcting our friends and associations about the false misunderstanding on our Mormon beliefs.

Kevin Brown said...

I wonder if this is the same one they showed like a year ago... I watched that one and your comments sound like it's the previous one I saw...

Anyway, Jeff the format looks so much better now.