marklindadaniel

Way too much pseudo-intellectual and pompous (and political) explaining--by the last 2 or 3 episodes you would hardly know it was about comedy at all. As someone said at the end, if you have to explain comedy, there's something wrong.

Host Billy Crystal does his best to keep the focus on humor, but he's swimming against the tide.

The second episode, on family sitcoms, is the best because it shows a lot of reasonably-long clips. Gracie Allen is the funniest in the whole series.

The good news is that lots of current comics are on the record speaking passionately about the need for free speech, making people (especially those with power) uncomfortable, offending people, and mocking the establishment. These folks are desperately needed in our era of "speech is violence."

5 stars for the bits (sadly, too small a portion of the content) that are hilarious.

We thought we knew a lot about the origins of movies, having watched the 13-episode series "Hollywood" narrated by James Mason. But each episode of "Titans", especially those covering the 1890s to mid-1910s, had us saying "I never knew that." By focusing on the business perspective--innovators who had a feeling that motion pictures could be big, but struggled to figure out how--the series explains how and why the innovations happened.

The docudrama is narrated as oral history by an older Adolf Zukor. The dynamics between the competitors/collaborators are often fascinating. The final episode or two, covering the end of the silent era, get bogged down by details about corporate wheeling and dealing, which can be hard to follow. Nevertheless, the earlier portions more than make up for it.