The Reagans

A well done documentary marrying video of the Reagans with contemporary accounts of people who knew them and worked with them, including their son.

Reagan was a B actor, a mediocre actor and someone who had very limited success in life until he was 60+ and he became the front man for powerful and wealthy interests who wanted a right wing government in California and later in America.

He went from being the head of a union (the Screen Actors Guild) to being anti union over night because the pay was better. He apparently never had any political or ideological views of his own and just aped the things that he was fed.

He was an actor. He made his living delivering the lines he was told to deliver, acting the way he was paid to act. In the documentary, you can see his non existent understanding of what he was fronting and you can hear people pick apart his positions, including the people he worked with.

His own son is very critical of him and is on record elsewhere saying that he doesn't think his father ever read a book. A single book. In his lifetime.

Reagan was a disastrous President and the decline of the country can certainly be connected to the things he did while President that were disastrous. And he created the lowered expectations that lead to the election of George W Moron and Trump.

A good example of a disastrous policy - eliminating the fairness doctrine in news which allowed the rise of Fox and others and the 7/24 disinformation age that we live in. Another example is the deregulation of the savings and loan industry which lead to enormous frauds in that industry and its collapse.

If you want a good summary of Reagan and his time in office, watch the documentary. Ignore the negative reviews. The people writing those are apologists for Reagan and Trump and the current brain dead GOP.

"The Reagans" (2020 release; 4 episodes of about 55 min. each) takes a new look at the legacy of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. As Episode 1 "The Hollywood Myth Machine" opens, Reagan is in the White House taping a TV commercial for his 1984 re-election campaign. Ronald Reagan Jr. comments "My father was a strange fellow to be president of this country." We then go back in time to "1937" when Reagan, then 26 yrs. old is signed by Jack Warner to a studio contract. With the help of Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons, it is the beginning of a how "the story became the reality", as the Reagans' daughter Patti Davis puts it. At this point we are less than 15 min. into Episode 1.

Couple of comments: please do not confuse this documentary mini-series with the same titled (and controversial) CBS mini-series from 2003. It is equally important to note that this series is not just about Ronald Reagan, but it is just as much about Nancy Reagan. Episode 1 is fascinating for a number of reasons, none more so to understand how Ronald Reagan, who grew up a Democrat, eventually evolved into a Republican, and not just any Republican, but a Barry Goldwater-type conservative at that. Reagan changed from being a union guy to an all-out pro-business/anti-union guy because it was politically convenient. Episode 1 also examines how Nancy became the rock in Reagan's life that would propel him to the presidency. Episode 1 concludes with Reagan's stunning victory in the 1968 California governor's race. Can't wait to see the remaining 3 episodes. By the way, I immigrated to this country, arriving from Belgium in Washington DC for graduate studies in 1983, yes smack in the middle of the Reagan two term presidency. I was welcomed by this country with arms wide open, and I've lived in the US ever since. Fast forward to 2016 when this country elected a blatant racist and xenophobe to the White House. Thankfully now fired by the American people.

"The Reagans" premiered this weekend on Showtime, and Episode 1 is now available on SHO On Demand and other streaming services. New episodes air Sunday evenings at 8 pm Eastern. If you have any interest in politics or in the history of this country, I'd readily suggest you check out "The Reagans" documentary mini-series, and draw your own conclusion.

It is awful how the Reagans were to poor families while they spent money on themselves. It's INSANE that they gutted the New Deal and believed in Trickle Down economics. Obviously they were both spokespeople for evangelicals and corporations. It's also nuts they had so many gay friends and let AIDS just go unattended for so long. Or how he really felt he had not sold arms for hostages - when he had? It was good Reagan tried to deescalate nuclear tensions. The story comes off like a tragedy of a man who believed in the myth of America and the corporations who used him to hijack our political system.

I'm not a Reagan-fan by any mean, I watched the documentary from a liberal minded European view. But I'm also a historian and value a balanced effort and fact-based telling of things. Because Reagan is such a mythical being it's good to be critical of that myth and most of the criticism in this documentary is based on reality.

Still, you cannot just push the narrative, you have to base it on facts and numbers which are not shown to us in the documentary. If you talk about economy or poverty, show the numbers! There are good moments in this mini-series but it's frustrating and too one-sided to be considered a great documentary.

My Senior year in high school PBS aired it's American Experience special on Reagan. It a fairly nuanced, maybe even somewhat sympathetic documentary. This, however, is not. I don't think anyone can deny this is a critique of the Reagan's almost exclusively from a Left Wing point of view. That being said, it's not bad. It's fairly interesting, but as a mentioned just know going in it's not a puff piece.