After viewing the first of the four episodes, Pearl Harbor, my reactions are mixed.
First, you know there's a problem when you can't find the names of the author/s of the historical narration that Idris Elba reads in his wonderful voice. It certainly wasn't written by the few historians we see in Episode One: they all know better than to have written some of the most egregious passages, such as the repeated affirmations that only now are the stories of these three Black sailors being brought to light. As we see briefly at the end of the episode, the Black press, in particular the Pittsburgh Courier, began to fight for recognition for one of them, Doris Miller, within weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Navy most certainly dragged their feet, but the Courrier, backed by former presidential candidate Wendell L. Willkie, kept pushing, until Secretary of War Stimson finally released his name. (The Courier had to go to Miller's mother to get a picture of him.) In the years that followed, the Navy did finally name a ship after him, there was a postage stamp, etc. In 2018 a biography was published about him, Dante Brizill's Dorie Miller : greatness under fire. Miller is even played, briefly, by Cuba Gooding Jr. In Pearl Harbor, which should have been sunk before it was released.
So, in short, this first episode, far from telling these men's story "for the first time" after years of neglect, really doesn't tell anyone with an interest in World War II history anything we don't already know.
I had other problems with it as well. We do have surviving recollections of the Pearl Harbor attack by the other two Navy men covered here. We are only given small bits and pieces of it however. I would have liked to have heard a LOT more from them, the only real first-person witnesses involved.
I would have liked to see a lot LESS of the actors who were assigned to play these historical figures, however. Dorie Miller was a heavyweight boxing champion. From the few pictures we have, we see that he had a very powerful build. The young actor assigned to play him in the boxing scenes had no such figure, and made no impression. He also conveys his fear, when the ship is hit, with big bug eyes that are perilously close to the sort of thing Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best are now derided for.
Nor did we get to see Miller during his bond-drive speaking tour back in the States. That could have been interesting.
Instead, we spend a lot of time listening to descendants of these three sailors, many of whom never even met them. (Miller evidently has no direct descendants.) Their emotion was certainly very real, but too far removed from the subjects, at least for me.
In short, the research element seems to have been shortchanged, and the money put into CGI technology for an umpteenth "recreation" of the Pearl Harbor attack. We never hear what Miller's father thought of all this, for example, perhaps because the script writers never found Brizill's book.
If you want to learn about life for Black servicemen in the Navy in World War II read Matthew Delmont's highly readable Half-American. If you want feel-good narration - albeit beautifully read - and second-rate reconstructions of the Pearl Harbor attack, watch this.
And be prepared for some very jarring commercial breaks for Live Nation's upcoming tour by some girls' group, which do everything possible to undercut the seriousness of the subject at hand.
