Alphabetically, the second series on Disney Plus at the moment is this four-part documentary produced by National Geographic. What's surprising is how quickly this documentary feels out of date, let alone the decade itself.
Despite starting full of optimism, the 2000's first defining moment is perhaps one that will resonate forever. September the 11th redefines America's relationship with the world and leads the Western countries into a catastrophic war that would have political and economic ramifications for years. In popular culture, reality TV, smartphones and music sharing are revised to terrific success. The Indonesian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the French Concorde crash would also be headlining news.
I'm probably here going to list a series of problems that I had with the documentary, so I want to preface it all by saying that it wasn't bad. To try and condense a decades worth of news into about three hours is nigh on impossible, so it's natural that perhaps none of the stories it chose to deal with are not investigated that deeply. The September 11th to Iraq war is a fairly constant through line and is covered reasonably well, some of them though get less than a couple of minutes. There's also a weird attempt at balance in some stories that don't really require it. The Weapons of Mass Destruction debate is featured pretty heavily, but the sessions of people pointing out that they didn't find any, is rebuked by Bill O'Reilly who offers nothing expect "that was crap" as an opposing argument. For some reason, Barack Obama's election win is tempered by a story about a guy who asked him a question at a rally and then was championed by the republicans for 10 weeks. If this story crossed the Atlantic at the time, I really didn't remember it.
It's also interesting that this was filmed at a time when certain figures were obviously a lot less polarising than they are now. I've already mentioned O'Reilly, both he and his fellow disgraced former colleague Tucker Carlson appear here, as does "Former TV Host" Donald Trump who, without irony, discusses how greedy the people an Enron were.
It was a reasonable trip back down memory lane, but I don't feel like I gleaned any insight I didn't already have.
