Looking Back at 1978 from 2023: Musings on Rewatching NBC's Holocaust

It was the best of American TV times. It was the worst of American TV times. It was 1978 and I was getting ready to go to college later that year at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I don't  recall now how I heard about the TV show Holocaust--promos perhaps--but I somehow heard about it and I made the decision that I had to watch it because I liked what I had seen of 1970s short form American television. I found it more akin to British television and I was a devotee of British television. I suspect I also, probably foolishly and naively, thought that I might learn a little bit about the Shoah by watching the miniseries. And then there is the fact that some of my family are Jewish. 

Holocaust debuted on the NBC network and ran for five episodes from 16 April to 19 April. I watched every episode of the five part series and was mesmerised by it. I had rarely seen something that good on American television.

In retrospect and from the vantage point of several university degrees including in history, a much more critical attitude, and fifty years in the rear view mirror it is apparent that Holocaust, like so many American films and television shows of the era and still today, was and is, I would argue, simplistically manichean, overly sentimental, hyper romantic, uber melodramatic and only somewhat successful at being literate. But at least it tried and despite all its limitations it works. 

It also gets a lot of Holocaust history right (a history many Ukrainians, Poles, and Lithuanians prefer to cancel) thanks to its telescoping of so much of the history of the Shoah into the saga of one family, the Weiss family. As I have been rewatching Holocaust it has dawned on me how similar it is to another truly masterful TV series about World War II, a show that likewise looks at how the war impacts a family, the World on Fire (BBC 1, 2019-). By the time I finished my Holocaust rewatch it had become quite clear to me that the show was and remains an impressive achievement in its own right and a historic landmark in American commercial television.

On another matter, the CBS DVD is a cut version of the show. Apparently the blu ray, while containing more minutes of the show, is also abridged. One, of course, can't help but wonder why.  It is not the music of the show since it was written exclusively for Holocaust. Regardless of why this was released in such an incompetent manner by CBS Paramount is does point up something common in the US today: the incompetence of American business. As with the disastrous Buffy remaster by Fox it is clear that many American corporations no longer take pride in the quality of their workmanship. They only seem to care about pigging out at the all you can eat pig sty bar at the cafe Mammon.