It was first presented on BBC, as were a lot of superb series. The episode covering the 1910s is as good as anything similar and much better than most.
Someone complained about the narration, spoken and written by the Irish Mark Cousins. I found it utterly charming and extremely perceptive.
Cousins has spoken close to the microphone so his voice doesn't sound loud as he casually reels off his observations. And it's true. The terminal contours of every utterance curl upward, as they do in parts of the American South, so that they sound like a series of questions. "The source light is on the screen? A gap opens in the curtains like a Vermeer painting?" I was enthralled. The writing is dispassionate but full of insights and is sometimes quite funny. Harold Lloyd was turned from a Chaplin imitator into a nerd with black-rimmed glasses, but "a ballsy nerd." The emphasis is on directors that most Americans haven't paid much attention to, although film critics have. I'd seen Carl Theodore Dreyer's "Joan of Arc" before, two times, but Cousins was able to point out one or two of the reasons I found it so impressive.
The clips he's chosen to show from the silent movies of the era are longer than we usually see them, and they're picked to illustrate a specific point that Cousins is trying to make.
It's different from any other "film histories" that I've seen -- different in the sense of more involving, more informative, less repetitive, more original in its editing and narration.
At least in this episode, he hasn't much to say about modern Hollywood products. I understand why.
