David Bianculli

It's an exceptional work.

The American Revolution is written by Jeffrey C. Ward, who wrote The Civil War and many other Burns documentaries, including the ones on Congress and Thomas Jefferson.

and it's co-directed by Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, both of whom have worked with Burns for years.

But the American Revolution presents a challenge that even the Civil War did not.

No photographs, period.

To compensate, Burns and company use war reenactors and place them in the actual historical locations.

On many, let's say most, documentaries using a similar technique, the effect can be cheesy.

But in the American Revolution, the directors avoid showing the faces of the actors reenacting battle movements.

Instead, parts of their bodies are shown in intense close-up.

A bandaged hand here, a muddy boot there.

Elsewhere, in an approach that borders on pure art, the directors use drones to capture the action from high, high above.

It's unusual and beautiful.

Battles are the surprisingly dominant ingredient of this six-part series.

The American Revolution goes into more detail about individual battles than I ever learned in my own American history classes.

But new and vintage maps, clearly animated to show troop positions and movements, make it all very clear and very vibrant.

The actors quoting from the historical participants and the historians interviewed to comment on the action do the rest.

In their various war documentaries, Burns and his team always have focused as much on the ground troops as on the generals, often much more so, telling their story from the bottom up rather than the top down.

The American Revolution does both.

We hear important observations from George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, but also from Native Americans, revolutionary women, enslaved people, and others not always given voice in such narratives.

In addition, the program's historians make us think differently about the history we're witnessing.