Ken Burns’s video series The Civil War and The Game have evidently reignited interest in the film documentary as a genre and turned our history (and the national pastime of the American people, baseball) into the stuff of public television. In making these films, he has given the National Endowment for the Arts something to cheer about (and to support), and PBS stations have recently had something more substantial to offer than lavishly decorated British costume dramas and Christiesque mystery shows. An instance of the new historical documentary is In Search of the Oregon Trail, narrated by Stacy Keach, recently broadcast by the Long Island PBS station, WLIW.

In producing his television series, Burns assembled a talented crew of filmmakers, and one of them, director Stephen Ives, has now launched his own production, The West, which was shown on PBS in September. The West is a set of nine TV programs, totaling ...

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