#*docaweek

100 Documentaries → 10/100 || A Few Good Pie Places

PRODUCER: Rick Sebak (WQED) YEAR: 2015 WATCH: PBS

OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION: “ There are delicious pies for sale at shops, restaurants, cafes and roadside stands across America. So, in this delicious documentary we celebrate A Few Good Pie Places where people still make flaky crusts and scrumptious fillings.” - PBS

MISSION STATEMENT: “Since I was a small kid, I’ve known how important a bakery can be. There was a bakery across the street from my elementary school, and it was a frequent stop on my way home. And I know many bakeries here in Pittsburgh where I live now, and I’m fascinated by how they become such a valued part of a neighborhood. Nowadays you often see lists of Ten Best Bakeries or even 50 Best Bakeries, but I don’t understand how anyone can make that claim. These bakeries we feature are all really great, but I wouldn’t pretend to know if they’re the best. So I decided we should just call this program 'A Few Great Bakeries' and we’ll hope to convince people to look for more.” - Rick Sebak

MY TAKE: Upfront: this is Sebak’s weakest food documentary, at least of those that are still able to be sourced by the general viewing public at all. That said, it’s perfectly fine for comfort-viewing, and there’s nothing concrete I can point to that’s wrong with it. The inherent conceit of “scrapbook documentary” -- as Sebak, who is credited with the invention of the genre and coinage of the term, calls his works -- is that its through-line relies on fascinating ordinary people, and maybe it’s just that... piemakers are the least fascinating group he’s covered? (Sorry, Ned of Pushing Daisies, you’re different since you’re fictional.)

Perhaps the weakness comes from the distinct lack of voice in the piece, both from Sebak’s editing and those featured. The regionality that Sebak has always sought to highlight, at least in his national PBS programs like this, doesn’t shine the way that it does in “Hot Dog” or “Ice Cream.” And you CANNOT tell me that pie isn’t a historically regional food -- Jan & Michael Stern have built a career on it.

Maybe it’s that for the first time, Sebak’s voice feels forced. I have a loose theory that the “generic” feeling, especially compared to “A Hot Dog Program” (1999) and “An Ice Cream Show” (1996), was borne of the Internet Age. Rather than the delightful sense in the older programs that the featured personalities kind of assumed that everyone’s idea of [insert thing here] was their local version, “A Few Good Pie Places” has no such conceit. Marionberry piemakers in Washington know that no one else has marionberries and Iowa sugar-cream bakers know that no one else has tried a sugar-cream pie. There’s an underlying tone that Sebak, in the editing room, had to trim out all of the SEO Optimized Pitches this time around in a way he didn’t before. Even the tiny independents who Sebak and his crew find in far-flung places from Alaska and Hawai’i to Pennsylvania and California have done the market research.

That’s not to say that anyone comes across unlikable or anything. Far from it. It’s charming and everyone’s very sweet and gracious and damn if I don’t want pie. There’s just a bit of a hollow sense that, just as real scrapbooking has taken a sharp hit as a craft in the age of digital photo albums, scrapbook documentary might be harder to make really sing if the average person is worried about how they’ll come across in a thousand Google results instead of on a single public TV showcase.

(BUT DAMN IF I DON’T WANT PIE NOW.)

RATING:

100 Documentaries → 9/100 || Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure - Episode 2

PRODUCER: BBC YEAR: 2012 WATCH: BBC | DailyMotion

OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION: “Chefs Ken Hom and Ching-He Huang undertake a culinary adventure across China, sampling its food, history, and culture.” - BBC

MY TAKE: [Catch up on Episode 1 + my series overview!]

In this installment, Ching-He Huang and Ken Hom head to Chengdu, further inland and the capital of Sichuan province. Sichuan food is arguably the most well-known form of Chinese food in the Western world, although its introductions and adaptations in America and the UK are very different, which I feel like this particular documentary really glossed over in terms of looking at when/how/why different areas of China have experienced large-scale emigration and ways that the treatment of Chinese immigrants affected the development of American “Chinese food” and British “Chinese food”. (Another documentary on my list, Foods of Chicago, covers this well with regard to America, if you’re curious. It’s why I noticed that this doc didn’t go into it even when Ching-He is talking about adapting the things they’re making or eating in China for the British kitchen.)

Anyhoo, the element of Sichuan cuisine that most makes it unique is the Sichuan peppercorn, or in Britishism the Sichuan flower pepper, which creates the “la” sensation of Sichuan ma la food -- “hot-numb,” or the contrast between hot chilies and the Sichuan peppercorns (which are not actually related to pepper? It’s actually a tiny tiny citrus?) that literally numbs the tongue and lips. It’s thought that it affects the nerves in some mildly neurological way, because it does cause a temporary activation in some nerves that normally are not sensitive to touch (from chewing, for example) or temperature (of the hot food itself). Growing up in the Midwest, where “Schezuan” food has neither actual chilies nor any semblance of ma la, this was super cool to learn about and to see.

As you can see in the gifs, this Westward move for Ching-He and Ken brings more exaggerated, more entrenched gender roles and expectations thereof for Ching-He when they visit the kitchen of a Chengu hotpot restaurant. When they visit a local home, Ken is invited to relax as a guest while Ching-He helps the daughter, mother, aunt, and grandmother to prepare an expansive meal; they separate so that Ken can visit a high-end restaurant kitchen while Ching-He does a second home stay with an organic pig farmer and his wife.

They reconvene just in time to end this installment by visiting Sichuan’s most famous residents... giant pandas! Who are hilarious and cute OF COURSE. But they just eat bamboo, no ma la for them. And no more massive, Westernized cities for Ching-He and Ken, either: episodes three and four bring them much further West into the parts of China that the Western world tends not to acknowledge at all, and where neither of them has cultural literacy...

REC?: Yes. Obviously food issues apply, and a blanket trigger warning for discussions of Mao and the effects of his brutality.

RATING:

100 Documentaries → 8/100 || Foods of Chicago: A Delicious History

PRODUCER: PBS-WTTW YEAR: 2009* WATCH: PBS 

*I swear to everything I believe in that this first aired in 2004, but that’s not what PBS says??? But I VIVIDLY RECALL watching it in 2004. So I think PBS is lying.

OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION: “You are what you eat goes the old saying. So what can we learn about Chicagoans from the food on our plates? WTTW 11's Geoffrey Baer plays both taste-tester and tour guide, exploring the little-known stories behind Chicago's favorite foods.” - PBS

MORE FROM PBS: “How did the Chicago-style hot dog come to be? It became popular during the Great Depression, when various ethnic groups added their favorite veggies to a German sausage with the hopes of getting a cheap, well-balanced meal. Jay's Potato Chips? A snack-food junkie named Al Capone developed a taste for the chips while betting on the ponies in New York, and asked his supplier to start making them for his speakeasies. You probably know… that Italian Beef and Deep Dish Pizza were invented in Chicago (and we'll learn the history of those foods) but did you know that flaming saganaki, the cafeteria, the brownie, and Chicken Vesuvio were also invented here? We'll meet the people who say they can prove it.

Other Highlights Include:

A tour of Chicago's New Maxwell Street Market. It's like a trip to Mexico.

A Native American prepares the type of meal her ancestors might have eaten. Geoffrey tastes the wild onions for which Chicago is likely named.

How corned beef is made.

How the diet of Italian immigrants made them the target of prejudice.

Two legendary German restaurants, the Berghoff and the Chicago Brauhaus remind us of the days when German food was king in Chicago.

Chef Steve Chiappetti shows us how a true Chicago steakhouse makes a steak. (He should know, his family owns Chicago's last slaughterhouse!)

The foods of Polish Noblemen and rural Polish Highlanders. We learn the peasant origins of many popular Polish foods (pierogis, for example), and how Polish-Americans have developed eating traditions all their own.

The 16th Century Muslim empire that had a huge impact on the foods you'll find at Chicago's Indian restaurants.

We get a "cheezborger" and chips ("no fries!") at the Billy Goat, where we learn about the birth of a classic Saturday Night Live routine and the Curse of the Billy Goat.

We discover how people from one tiny region of China, called Toisan, gave us almost all of our favorite Chinese dishes. That's because most of Chicago's Chinese emigrated from that region. We'll also see how the Toisanese altered their food to appeal to American tastes.

And our feast of Chicago food history continues with:

Sushi night at an Italian kosher restaurant.

The birth of the Chicago hot dog, McDonald's, Jay's Potato Chips, and the cafeteria in Chicago.

Soul Food at a West Side church. (We'll learn how African-American cooking still incorporates ingredients from Africa, as well as slave traditions.)

You'll learn the hallmarks of Chicago-style barbecue.

A visit to a pita bread factory to learn about the bread's place in Lebanese culture.

Chef Dudley Nieto gives us a Mexican food tour of Pilsen, where he goes to get ideas for his upscale restaurant.

A visit to an Azteca Foods tortilla factory.

We see the birthplace of the jibarito, a Puerto Rican sandwich made with plantains.

And don't forget dessert: learn how Chicago was once the candy capital of America, visit the Tootsie Roll factory, and see how Chicago's candy industry is changing with the times.”

MY TAKE: This is another one of my “comfort documentaries” -- I’m sure you’re noticing a theme that they’re gentle edutainment about food and nice people having a good time eating things they like, plus some edutainment about American history. That is basically the main thing in this world that gives me comfort.

I also really like Chicago history, and since I’ve been homesick af lately, I decided to rewatch this oldie and weep a bit and indulge in something that unabashedly glorifies Chicago culture. 

I appreciate so much that this doc goes beyond looking at “Chicago food” as deep-dish pizza, hot dogs, Tootsie rolls, and Italian beef. It does mention all of those, OBVIOUSLY, because they are EXCELLENT CHICAGO FOODS with interesting histories attached, but they all come out of the collision of multiple food traditions meeting in one city with one major industry at the time -- meatpacking and stockyards -- and I like that this doc spends more time talking about those different cultures than it does about the ~all-American results.

I also really, really like that it starts with the Algonquin and Miami-Illinois people and their food traditions, since they’re who gave Chicago its name (shikaakwa, for the ramps that grow in the area in Spring). I like that it gives equal time and weight to all of the ethnic and racial groups mentioned, because I feel like that was a conscientious and ethical choice by Geoffrey Baer (et al) that adds a lot of dimension to the narrative of “this is Chicago, and this is where our foods come from,” and it isn’t a choice that I’ve seen a lot of documentary-lite filmmakers make. I also appreciate that in addition to visiting a great Chicago restaurant for each type of cuisine, they also share a meal in someone’s home, and their actual life story becomes woven into the narrative about their food, because that’s just... how food works, in my opinion, and what makes food culture so interesting to me. 

(Rambles for 27 hours about how if you really want to know about a person or character or culture or society, know what/how they eat and waxes poetic about good food-writing and historiography).

It’s also a general point of pride for me that I’ve been to all of the restaurants mentioned except the Billy Goat, and that’s because I don’t want to go there until I can pronounce that last name and get the prize. I’m almost there.

Anyway, I don’t have anything super deep, per se, to say about this one, I just really like it and think it’s very charming.

REC?: Yes. Obviously food issues apply, and there are mentions of India’s caste system and discussions of xenophobia. There are also some gratuitous shots of raw meat and meat curing, so if that squicks you then prepare to fast-forward that part (I always do).

RATING: 

100 Documentaries → 7/100 || Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure - Episode 1

PRODUCER: BBC YEAR: 2012 WATCH: BBC | DailyMotion

OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION: “Chefs Ken Hom and Ching-He Huang undertake a culinary adventure across China, sampling its food, history, and culture.” - BBC

MY TAKE: This is a 4-part documentary, and I’m treating each part as a separate documentary because they differ so much and have very unique arcs, which is part of what I like so much about this miniseries.

"Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure” is one of those documentaries that Dean Pelton rails about at Abed in the Community episode where they make a Greendale commercial -- “WHY ISN’T THE THING YOU’RE MAKING A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT EVER THE THING THE DOCUMENTARY ENDS UP BEING ABOUT?” (paraphrasing bc I’m not looking up the quote right now).

Ostensibly, Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure is about, well, exploring China through food, moving across the massive country from East to West, starting in Beijing and ending on the Tajikstan border. Like, first off, carte blanche, as a white Westerner, I was amazed by how... un-China-like so much of China really is, and I think I really needed to see that. I mean, it’s huge! And somehow even though I knew facts about how many minorities and dialects and regions there are in China, I never pictured them as distinct as they are, and I’m really glad to have been able to see it and correct that in my thinking and I’m impressed that a Western documentary like, went there and showed it.

But that’s not even what the “real story” of the documentary is -- although it’s part of it.

The “real story” is, I think, multilayered, which I really, really love. There’s the obvious layer of the effects of the cultural revolution and IMMENSE inequality across China as you move Westward and away from Beijing. I love that in each hour-long episode, they go both to a city center and to a rural home within a few hours’ drive, and I love that it doesn’t ever feel like “tragedy porn” because they aren’t showing paucity or trying to be pitying -- everywhere they go, there is food and there is pride and there is a distinct sense of self and place. In Part I, Ching-He Huang goes to a pork farmer’s home in Chuandixia, an almost-abandoned town 400 miles West of Beijing, to see his organic operations and cook with his wife [EDIT: Sorry, the pork farmer is in Episode 2 -- this one is an innkeeper and his wife].

Yes: it is important to specify that she cooks with his wife, because another layer of the documentary -- and one that I naturally think is particularly interesting and important -- is, frankly, the devolution of Ching-He as they move further and further West over the month of their trip and she is treated worse and worse by the men in places they visit, especially compared to her older, male co-host. There’s another documentary about gender roles and the status of women in China that I’ve wanted to see FOR YEARS and still can’t track down (”Spilled Water”), and the clips and interviews I’ve heard from that piece really came back to me as I watched through this.

In Beijing, Ken and Ching-He are invited to cook in the white-coat, very Westernized kitchen at a high-end restaurant, and like... the looks on the faces of the employees (all men) as they watch Ching-He cook in their kitchen signal the entire force of this arc beginning. But, since she is a Chinese woman who was trained in England and works in England, you can see on her face right back that she knows those looks and how to ignore them.

(Spoiler alert: that changes as it gets more blatant, personal, and less Westernized-sexism(?) as they go. It ends fascinatingly in Episode 4.)

But that also introduces, or quietly underscores, the third arc, which gets a lot of airtime in this episode in particular, and that is that both Ken and Ching-He come from families displaced by the Communist regime and who are making their first real, extended trips back to China as adults with this series. As someone who is not an immigrant or the child of immigrants, that experience is one that I do not share, but it’s one that I think is vitally important to be able to, like, in the parlance that we used in my MFA program, empathetically imagine -- as in, not like “oh I can imagine that experience,” but like, “I need to be able to create a frame of reference outside of my own privilege and assumptions so that I can understand the dimensional fullness of that status and how it affects all other experiences for that person.”

I think I’ve said it before, but I like best when documentaries force me to do that so that I can appreciate them the right way. So this series gets an A+ from me, although I do think there are a few scenes (particularly in Episode 3, when I get there post-wise) that exist in part to shock or ~gross out Western audiences.

Or I might just be particularly squeamish about bugs, which is definitely a true thing, so ymmv.

REC?: Yes. Obviously food issues apply, and a blanket trigger warning for discussions of Mao and the effects of his brutality.

RATING:

Ahhh, I just saw this! I think a good kind of “starting point” for it is the old American Experience PBS documentary about it – in some regions it’s on PBS.org, but not all, because of licensing. There used to be a t/orren/t with every American Experience doc in it, but I think it probably died with KAT. :\ I think that oftentimes they do a good job, though, and I like that they mostly refrain from dramatized recreations and too much supposition.

I teeeend to trust PBS? Carte blanche, I used to intern for two documentary series produced by PBS, but if anything, I feel like that would have disillusioned me if I felt like I were being coached in bad methodology. I think that American Experience is a bit different because it has many different producers and writing teams, but there have been very few that I’ve been like, “WHOA, HOLD UP, THAT IS BLATANTLY FALSE AND DISPROVEN” or anything. (That said, literally all history presentations in any format is biased in some way, etc. etc.)

I haven’t actually found any nonfiction about it yet that I liked, because it tends to depersonalize the victims and sensationalize the circumstances of their deaths in a way that I think is ENTIRELY too prevalent in nonfiction (especially adult nonfiction) about the deaths of women.*

*This is a thing I will probably someday put my own nonfiction writing interest towards, but for YA. js.

A Documentary A Week in 2016 → WEEK 6 || PBS NOVA: Special Effects: Titanic and Beyond

PRODUCER: PBS YEAR: 1998 WATCH: PBS | Vimeo

OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION: “Cinema and science collide when it comes to special effects. Originally aired in 1998, this NOVA episode examines the research and technology that goes into creating cinematic special effects that are both realistic and mind-blowing. The episode pays particular attention to James Cameron's blockbuster hit and his ability to bring the RMS Titanic back to life.” - TV Guide

MY TAKE: So, this is last week’s documentary rec because I was GOING to do another upsetting forensic BBC one, but I have been having a week where I’m just like, “I really don’t want to write about, and also gif, a dead kid?” so instead I am sharing another one of my Comfort Recs.

This is a nearly-20-year-old documentary about special effects.

Absolutely everything about it is out of date. Like, the computers that you see the animators working on are... enormously bulbous. It’s amazing.

But here’s the thing: it’s about Jurassic Park and Titanic (and Flubber, but no one cares about Flubber) and those are 2/3 of the like, six movies that I enjoy in this world, so OBVIOUSLY I LOVE THIS DOCUMENTARY.

But more than about special effects, it’s about the science of perception and visual interpretation of information and the communication between the eye and the brain. As a neurodivergent individual whose optical nerves don’t actually transmit light information correctly for processing, this is a super interesting documentary for me. It always makes me wonder things about my own perception versus “normal” visual perception -- it makes me wonder if, say, the reason I didn’t understand that Muppets weren’t real creatures until I was in my early teens wasn’t just because I’m sweetly gullible and like believing in things, but because I literally don’t see some kind of difference that other people do. I like this doc because it makes me think, even though I’ve seen it like, twenty times, and because it is about my A+ Fave Movies, Jurassic Park and Titanic and kind of the Wizard of Oz and some others. But mostly Titanic and Jurassic Park. BE STILL MY HEART, MID-90′s LEO DICAPRIO AND ALSO VELOCIRAPTORS.

REC?: Yes, but with caveats:

1) It IS almost 20 years old. It is out of date. If you are actually a designer or do animation, you will learn nothing outside of the physiology stuff and even that may be out of date.

A Documentary A Week in 2016 → WEEK 5 || BBC History Cold Case: Crossbones Girl

PRODUCER: BBC YEAR: 2010 WATCH: BBC | DailyMotion

OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION: “A skeleton unearthed in an archaeological dig in the historic borough of Southwark in London sparks a new cold case when it is found to be covered with disfiguring scars. Renowned forensics expert Prof Sue Black leads her team at the Centre for Anatomy and Human ID at the University of Dundee in an investigation that will drag them into the seediest corners of early Victorian Britain. They use the latest facial reconstruction techniques to bring the identity of one of history's missing persons back into chilling view but in the process the team discovers much more than they bargained for.” - BBC

MY TAKE: Holy cow is this documentary upsetting. But I love it, and I wish that it didn’t take a hundred years and a really upsetting forensic investigation for this girl to be regarded as a human being and an individual.

Like I said last week: I really like BBC History Cold Case’s three experts, and this episode is one of the major reasons why. It would be extremely, extremely easy to dramatize and dehumanize its subject, and all three of them -- Dr. Sue Black, Dr. Xanthe Mallett, and Dr. Carolyn Wilkinson -- seem to take special care to make sure that the viewer knows that while this case is sad, and is unfortunately an individual emblematic of many in her time period, this body is an individual person’s and they are going to treat her as an individual and not as a symbol or a case study. They speak of her in terms of affection and are honestly very tender about her when they talk about the things they’re learning, but they also never make it sappy and melodramatic or lose their professionalism.

The Crossbones Girl was a Victorian teenage sex worker buried in an unmarked mass gravesite for “the outcast dead.” She had an extraordinarily painful infection of tertiary syphilis, which she was exposed to sometime between the ages of three and thirteen. She was malnourished, tiny, and had scarring on her bones from the illness. She was further infected by the mercury of common treatments at the time. She likely died bald from mercury poisoning. The Crossbones Girl was a deeply exploited individual whose life was essentially ruled and ended by the hypocrisy of Victorian British morality and obscene socioeconomic, gender oppression, and sexual exploitation under Victorian rule. The more the team learn about her life, through forensics and historical research, the clearer it is that both as an individual and -- as she is, unfortunately -- a stand-in for a whole class of people, the Crossbones Girl was not really afforded humanity while alive.

It means a lot to me, as a female viewer, that this is one of the few episodes where Xanthe Mallett searches so hard to find their subject’s name. But I’m not gonna lie: I get weepy when she’s reading through the hundreds of handwritten pages of names upon names of “the outcast dead” and how they died. It physically hurts my heart how many women and children throughout history, even outside of this specific circumstance, die without their names and are lumped together as just... forgotten things. Anyway.

This is also a very upsetting episode in terms of trigger warnings, just for like... fairly obvious reasons. If someone is transmitted an STI when they’re three years old, that’s a triggering thing. They also spend, IMO, a perhaps slightly exploitative, but I’m not 100% sure on that, time showing wax castings that were made contemporaneously to their subject of other syphilis sufferers’ faces and the disfigurements of the disease. If you have a thing with body horror or medical horror, I do not recommend this documentary. I only included gifs of the version of her face that they made as the “and here’s how she would have looked if she’d been healthy and well-nourished” version, which seems to have kind of just been as a form of self-comfort for Dr. Wilkinson, but the actual “and here’s how she looked at time of death” facial restoration is hard to look at, especially because they reveal the faces at the very end, and by then, you’ve learned about what this girl’s life was like, and it’s just... hard to look at.

I would be interested in the POV of a viewer with more knowledge than I have about the history and perspectives of sex workers and sex work, because my knowledge is very cursory, but in MY limited understanding, they are neither exploiting nor shaming her, but they do spend quite a chunk of time in the middle talking about STIs and STI treatment in the Victorian era, and like I said, it’s very visually graphic, so IDK whether that may loop around and be exploitative of people with STIs today. I honestly just don’t know, because I know almost nothing about tertiary syphilis tbh.

I appreciate that Xanthe twice goes to the site of memorials for “the outcast dead” and mourns for the Crossbones Girl and her possible real name. It isn’t scientific, but I think it’s something that reinforces her individuality and humanity after talking about subject matter that people DO dehumanize and use to strip people of their humanity.

It’s just, this is another one that makes me really weepy. It’s hard to watch but I’m glad I did. 

A Documentary A Week in 2016 → WEEK 4 || BBC History Cold Case: The Bodies in the Well

PRODUCER: BBC YEAR: 2011 WATCH: BBC | YouTube

OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION: “Professor Sue Black and her team use forensic science to shed light on the past. When the remains of 17 people - men, women and 11 children, one as young as two years old - were discovered in a dry well shaft in Norwich city centre, the local community were keen for answers about who these people were and what happened to them. Thought to date from the early 1200s, this becomes a case of suspected medieval murder but the final reveal of the identity of these people is an even bigger shock to all involved.” - BBC

BBC NEWS WRITE-UP: (Lengthy piece here, including a timeline of medieval British-Jewish history.) The History Blog also did a write-up here.

MY TAKE: I really like the women of History Cold Case -- in part because I like that it’s a documentary series that allows three woman scientists to show their expertise on their own terms, but also because I think that their attitudes and ethics keep the program respectful to the humanity of those they’re studying. This episode is from s2, which is slightly more dramatized in its cinematography and deals with “bigger” cases, such as this docu-hour’s 17 bodies, than s1, but Black, Mallett, and Wilkinson don’t let the jump-cuts and musical stings take over the fact that they are dealing with human beings.

I think any documentary about dead people, even historical, requires a blanket trigger warning -- because, let’s be honest, there is an inherent expectation that if they’re being studied, they probably didn’t die happily in their sleep -- but History Cold Case in particular doesn’t shy away from humanizing the victims of some pretty horrific parts of British history (in England -- they don’t leave British soil, which I kind of think is good. People who were killed by British colonizers should not be, IMO, fodder for British intellectuals/academics to dig up and study through a British lens.) I’m a historian, but my focus is totally outside of the medieval era, so I didn’t have any grounding in this area going into viewing this piece.

Spoiler: the seventeen people in the well were murdered Jews. The gif that I put at top-right is an antisemitic caricature drawn *in the official tax rolls of Norwich* around 1190CE. For some reason, it was shocking to me to learn that there even were Jews in medieval England at all, and I feel like that’s a shame, considering, like, I’m Jewish and didn’t expect that at all. I follow @medievalpoc and KNOW, both from that slice of academia and just from common sense, that of course medieval England had a broader tapestry of people than media or lowkey superficial knowledge suggests, but I was still really just... taken aback, learning about it.

But it did not surprise me that I learned about it through learning about how Jewish children were murdered. And thrown away in a well. And forgotten for almost 1000 years. It was important to the narrative of straight-up Anglo British superiority to write out the communal necessity and success and presence of Jewish people. It’s still important to that narrative to make sure it’s not acknowledged. It’s still important to that narrative to act like the Western world was forged by Anglo-Saxon Christians and their pet dragons and their bravery, not their hate-filled cowardice and gullible panic. It does not ever surprise me to learn about a chapter of marginalized history that the privileged erased, except on the level of being kind of surprised that anyone cared enough to uncover and acknowledge it. Black, Mallett, and Wilkinson do a lot of that in this series, and that’s a big part of why I like it. Although they’re also the team who worked with the body of Richard III when he was dug up in that parking lot (which is also a great documentary), that isn’t their primary interest. And I appreciate that.

It’s an upsetting episode in ways that some of the others are not, although it’s not the one that most affects/upsets me -- that’ll probably be next week’s Doc of the Week, which makes me cry more than this one does. But it’s upsetting for the same reasons that it surprised me, and it it’s upsetting that it had to be surprising. It’s upsetting as a reminder of how much of history as we know it erases the huge swaths, and entire families, and bodies of children, that the privileged group of the place and time want to see forgotten. It’s upsetting to think that before they were buried for 900ish years, people who did know those bodies were there walked past the well and knew what they had done and never wrote it down, never talked about it, never... cared. This is the kind of history that I think matters most, because it’s the kind that needs to be recovered and dealt with and not let to be buried for another millennium.

“In forensic anthropology, the news is always bad news,” says Dr. Sue Black, saying something that I wish more people in documentaries about the dead would state outright rather than letting exploitative filming make it seem like it’s not sad just because the people lived so long ago. “...In this case, I knew that we were not bringing closure. We were bringing almost the opposite. We were opening wounds that people are going to have to address.”

I hope we do. Because I also thought, while watching this again to make the gifs, that part of me envies that English historians can even look back at history from the 12th century when “we don’t have any here.” And then I caught myself, because that’s a fucking white-person lie. We have history that far back in America, we just pretend like we don’t. It’s the basis of our entire country to pretend that we don’t. We all pretend like there aren’t children’s bodies in the wells here. But there are. And that’s an open wound we are going to have to address, too.