It's a mixture of talking heads, on the ground footage and photography and whilst this has been done before, not quite like this.
For starters, the quality of the talking heads are top notch (Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Hilary Clinton and the very impressive Samantha Power amongst others), as these were the people directly involved in making tough and often impossible decisions, where they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. There's virtually no scapegoating, just honest explanations about what was going on at the time and the pressure the US government was under to make the right decisions, which in hindsight, were often wrong and where inaction was just as bad, if not worse than action. It's certainly not a Team America **** yeah puff piece.
The on the ground footage is at times an extremely hard watch and I don't think it's a spoiler to say that you're going to see a lot of dead bodies and worse. No doubt the makers thought long and hard about what they could and should include and as hard a watch as some of the footage is, I think they made the right and brave choice. There's reality tv and then there's actual reality tv.
They also do something quite funky with the photography, with many images (or maybe video stills) taken in the Oval Office and the War Room, whereby they kind of 3D it, so the camera pans and the perspective moves as if you were the one moving in the room, whilst Meryl Streep continues to narrate. It's hard to explain, but very effective.
The editors in particular deserve a huge amount of credit for how they brought this all together and I suspect the series will win many awards.
N. B I'm in the UK where all 8 episodes are already available and this is a review of the entire series.
