Television series

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History

Name: The Roosevelts: An Intimate History
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2014
Cast: Peter Coyote, Ken Burns

Ken Burns' seven-part, fourteen-hour epic braids Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt into one sweeping American century—presidencies, wars, marriages, illness, reinvention. Told through his signature grammar of still photographs, letters read aloud and unhurried narration, it's patient, moving, occasionally overwhelming television. For anyone willing to sit with history rather than skim it, this is total immersion in one family's outsized grip on the twentieth century.

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The Civil War1990

This is the film that invented the Ken Burns method—still photographs, first-person letters, mournful fiddle—applied to a war more brutal and more foundational than anything the Roosevelts lived through. If you loved the style, this is the mothership.

But Nine episodes of nineteenth-century carnage is a heavier lift than a century of Roosevelt triumph, and the pacing hasn't sped up with age.

The Vietnam War2017

Same team, same patient grammar, but turned on a war within living memory that still divides the country. It's the natural next chapter if you want to see how the Roosevelts' America curdled.

But Ten episodes of a war with no clean resolution and plenty of American failure—bleaker and angrier than presidential triumph.

Eleanor and Franklin1976no page yet

A dramatized, Emmy-winning miniseries covering the same marriage from the inside, with actors filling in the silences the documentary leaves to historians. Warmer and more melodramatic where Burns is measured and elegiac.

But 1970s TV-movie pacing and production values; it plays like theatre compared to the visual richness of archival documentary.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Succession2018

Same engine as the Roosevelts—a powerful family where private wounds become public history—but stripped of nobility and rebuilt as tragicomedy about what dynasties actually do to the people inside them.

A fictional dynasty devours itself in real time—media empire instead of the White House, but the same currency of legacy, loyalty and who gets to matter. Cynical, hilarious, and merciless in ways history can't be.

But Purely satirical and profane where the Roosevelts is sincere and reverent; if you want uplift, this will not give it to you.

John Adams2008no page yet

HBO's prestige miniseries does for the founding Adamses what Burns does for the Roosevelts—a political dynasty rendered as a marriage, a family, a set of impossible choices, with career-best Giamatti and Linney.

But Different century, different stakes—no polio, no New Deal, no world war—so the parallel is structural rather than substantive.

Lincoln2012

Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis compress a presidency into two hours of legislative arm-twisting, showing how a great man actually gets anything done in Washington—a useful counterpoint to fourteen hours of biography.

But Narrow focus on a few weeks of one term; you lose the sweep and intimacy that makes the Roosevelts series so absorbing.

Hyde Park on Hudson2012no page yet

A slighter, gossipier film about FDR's affair and a royal visit to his mother's estate—the private Roosevelt world played for wit and unease rather than reverence.

But Bill Murray's FDR is a curiosity rather than a revelation, and the film's scale is a fraction of Burns' ambition.

The Kennedys2011no page yet

Another American political dynasty gets the multi-generational treatment—ambition, tragedy, charisma, ruin—if you're drawn to the Roosevelts as a family drama as much as a history lesson.

But Critically divisive and tabloid in places; lacks the sober authority and archival depth of the Burns approach.

Baseball1994no page yet

Ken Burns turns the same unhurried, elegiac method on the national pastime, tracing a century of America through a game instead of a family—proof the technique works on almost anything.

But Eighteen and a half hours is an enormous commitment, and you need to care at least a little about baseball to stay with it.

Jazz2001no page yet

For Burns completists: the same architecture of photographs, voiceover and testimony, now tracing American music instead of American power—an oblique way to keep sitting with his voice and rhythm.

But The weakest and longest of his major works by consensus; a big ask if you're not already a jazz person.

Sunrise at Campobello1960no page yet

This is the myth Burns is quietly correcting—watch it to see the polished, pre-revisionist version of the same story, made close enough to the events to still function as propaganda.

A Hollywood studio biopic made while people who knew FDR were still alive, dramatizing his polio and political comeback with the confident, uncomplicated heroism of its era. A time capsule of how America wanted to remember him.

But Stagey and hagiographic, shot like a filmed play; it has none of the nuance or archival texture the Burns series spent decades earning.

Grey Gardens1976

It shows the underside of the world Eleanor came from—privilege, eccentricity and decline instead of public service—a reminder that not every old American family gets a Ken Burns treatment.

A documentary portrait of Jackie Kennedy's aunt and cousin, aristocrats gone to seed in a crumbling East Hampton mansion—the same WASP dynastic world as the Roosevelts, filmed at its most undone.

But Uncomfortably intimate and sad in a way that has nothing to do with triumph; some viewers find it exploitative rather than moving.