Summary
The American Experiment is a surprisingly balanced birthday celebration of enduring but messy and imperfect liberal democracy.
Netflix isn’t immune to outright propagandistic puff pieces – think back a little way to Marines, an explicit recruitment tool disguised as an even-handed docuseries. You’d think that the upcoming semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence would qualify as a significant enough event for the might of American democracy to be worth making an uncomplicatedly big deal of, but that’s an idea that The American Experiment cautiously sidesteps. The titular experiment is, it claims, very much still ongoing, and more to the point has been beset on all sides by profound failures and setbacks, as any experiment necessarily must.
Across five solidly paced and densely informative hours, the series – produced by Tom Hanks and directed by Brian Knappenberger, who made Turning Point: The Vietnam War, also on Netflix – charts the earliest days of colonial rebellion and the Revolutionary War while frequently flashing forward to see how the ideals of the founding fathers are faring two and a half centuries later. Results are mixed socially and politically, but in terms of documentary filmmaking quality remain impressively consistent.
This is not the only good, unexpected idea underpinning The American Experiment. Another is to lean away from sensationalistic talking-head choices and instead rely on authoritative experts, people less ready-made for marketing stills but much more equipped to lay out the facts. This is even true of the dramatic reenactments, which eschew celebrity casting (mostly) for even key figures like Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Sure, there are a smattering of recognisable political figures from both sides of the aisle, including Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Hilary Clinton from stage left, and Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Mike Pence from stage right. But even that is intentional, a way to add democratic flavour to a documentary that is unavoidably left-leaning but is also quick to acknowledge contrary points of view and the hypocrisies that have underpinned every advance in freedoms that this republic has made in its history.
And that’s the clincher. In both the past and the present, Knappenberger returns to intrinsic contradictions and unambiguous failures, linking them together through recurring ideas that have stood the test of time but not without difficulty and necessary evolution. Slavery is unavoidable, as is the displacement of Indigenous nations and their consistent sidelining through independence negotiations. The denial of freedoms for women, including the right to vote, and the conflation of the personal interests of wealthy landowning men with the needs of the wider nation, are acknowledged. This is not an ooh-rah parade of jingoism, but a sobering, only cautiously celebratory acknowledgement that America was built on blood and bones – but it was also built to last.
The faultlines leading from, say, slavery to the civil rights movement, or from Washington’s rejection of autocracy to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, are coherently traced by a who’s-who of relevant experts, and the balance in perspective helps to push the idea of America’s imperfections being integral to its successes. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of pottery repair that embellishes imperfection as a sign of resilience, The American Experiment is a cogent argument in favour of the failures having been worth the long-term outcomes in liberal democracy and self-government.
Perhaps the biggest success of the docuseries, though, is its reminder that we should be worried about losing the most fundamental of America’s principles, and a cautionary tale about allowing toxic partisanship to irreparably divide a nation that has endured for so long.
