A young Patrick McDreamy Dempsey as JFK in Reckless Youth.

In the history of broadcast television in the United States, there have been no less than eight fictional historical mini-series and made-for-TV movies about the Kennedy family.Those that have focused on JFK specifically include ABC’s 1974 made-for-TV movie Missiles of October, which told the story of the Kennedy Administration’s actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis and based. There is also NBC’s 1983 Kennedy, which is a five-part mini-series depicting JFK’s presidency, and notably starred Martin Sheen as the ill-fated president. ABC showed the three-part miniseries The Kennedys of Massachusetts in 1990, which primarily focuses on the early history of the family, beginning with Joseph Kennedy’s courtship of Rose Fitzgerald and ending with JFK’s inauguration speech. One of my personal favorites is ABC’s 1993 miniseries JFK: Reckless Youth, which starred Patrick Dempsey as John F. Kennedy, and chronicled JFK’s youth through to his first congressional election. These representations, for the most part, reinforce JFK’s public persona as a cold war warrior, and are emblematic of a 1960s brand of New Frontiersman masculinity, typified by his reputation as a brilliant scholar and athlete at an Ivy League university, and membership within groups mainly exclusive to men, including boarding schools, fraternities, the military, clubs, and government. And yet, also personalized by his unique Boston accent, and Irish Catholic ethnicity.

In January, 2011, The History Channel announced that it would not be airing its mini-series The Kennedys for U.S. audiences. THC picked up The Kennedys project in December, 2009, and it starred Greg Kinnear as JFK, Katie Holmes as Jacqueline Kennedy, and was produced by 24 creator Joel Surnow. It was part of the network’s greater push from Executive Vice President and General Manager Nancy Dubuc to expand into glossy, cinematic fare, and The Kennedys was slated to be THC’s first scripted original docudrama program. As you may know, THC decided to drop The Kennedys after a series of protests online at Stop Kennedy Smears, although it still aired on THC’s global network in the UK, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. Looking at the objections protestors had about The Kennedys, which were based on leaked copies of the miniseries script, it is clear the JFK’s masculinity is at the forefront of concerns. Protestors comments that this miniseries demeans JFK’s legacy by making him out to be emotionally and physically weak, portraying him as a man with a crippling back injury, as well as a sex addict and a drug addict. This public outcry illuminates how The Kennedys was interpreted as a challenge to JFK’s mythic New Frontiersman masculinity.

The infamous 2011 The Kennedys mini-series is a bit heavy handed in its re-telling of John F. Kennedy’s story. The Kennedys begins its program with an emphasis on JFK’s back pain, and throughout the series is aggressive in its characterization of Jack Kennedy as an incapacitated leader during his presidency. This is compounded as he is treated in secret for his back pain with shots of methamphetamine, and when he isn’t grimacing in pain, or getting doped up on meth, he is usually overshadowed by a father he cannot stand up to or lying to Jackie about his infidelities. And while some of these aspects may be backed up by historical evidence, it is a portrayal US audiences are not accustomed to seeing, and which did not resonant with some viewers’ conception of who JFK was. What this does demonstrate is the role of audiences in historical meaning making through television, as well as the contested nature of historical television and collective memory.

National Geographic’s Killing Kennedy is the most recent JFK historical docudrama to air on television in the United States. In the As you know, it is not the first televisual account of JFK’s life, however it is the first to be based on a book written by Bill O’Reilly, directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Rob Lowe in the titular role as Kennedy. His Kennedy accent alone is worth the watch. This miniseries is perhaps different from its predecessors in the way it parallels the story of JFK and Jackie along side Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina. In this sense, it is an attempt to reassert the official narrative about JFK’s assassination by a lone gunman on the grassy knoll, and attempts to explain Oswald’s motivations for killing the president. O’Reilly’s book is reportedly full of factual inaccuracies, and this straightforward story about the assassination challenges the conspiracy theories still circulating about JFK’s death. Nevertheless, Killing Kennedy drew 3.4 M viewers to National Geographic when it aired on Sunday, November 10th, which is a viewership record for National Geographic. More importantly, both the production investments in big name producers, stars, and a Hollywood director, as well as the popularity of Killing Kennedy, demonstrate the continued fascination with retelling JFK’s story through televisual docudrama.

The show turned from the usual Sunday night period travails of the upper classes to chronicle a primarily working-class community living in overcrowded tenements, where children played in bombsites and washing was strung across the streets. However, the community was presented through the eyes of the middle-class midwives, with new arrival Jenny as our protagonist. This world was also served with lashings of sentimentality, the odd quirky nun and comedy pratfalls off bicycles (utilising the comedic skills of sitcom star Miranda Hart as the bumbling, frightfully posh Chummy). This is 1950s poverty spit-shined and filtered through a warm golden glow – even a Catholic home for unwed mothers is all white light and a kindly priest (until they wrench the baby from its hysterical teen prostitute mother). There is abrasiveness alongside the comforting nostalgia – brawls on the street, unwed mothers, rotting housing, deaths in childbirth. But the midwives are our focus, the births and mothers come and go. As Willa Paskin at Salon noted, this is a medical procedural; we deal with the dangerous birth of the week, the midwives move on. But this is also part of its pleasure – these are young women with careers, occasionally saving lives, not sitting around in drawing rooms waiting for someone to marry them.

But why didn’t Call the Midwife’s British success translate to PBS? Though it had solid critical praise, particularly for Hart, the lack of twitter buzz was marked after its decent 1.5 million premiere. I’d like to make a few suggestions, the first being politics. US critics seemed uncomfortable with its depiction of the NHS – Mo Ryan suggested it ‘strays into almost comical propaganda now and then’, whilst the New York Times felt ‘at times the series sounds like a public service ad, extolling the benefits of the system’. Interestingly, Bitch magazine used Midwife as a framework to talk through public health issues in the run up to the election (‘What Nuns Know about Reproductive Justice’ is perhaps my favourite headline about the series).

For all of Mdiwife’s tendency to marginalise the working-class point of view, this is a progressive history demonstrating the gains made by ‘socialised medicine’, to use the menacing US term. So is there a certain degree of distance, is not a collective history easily transferred for US audiences? (Perhaps its soft-focus post-war urban community also fits awkwardly with the nostalgic US national imaginary of the 1950s as a middle-class small town?). It is useful here to bring Downton Abbey back into the mix, and whisper that maybe America just prefers its British period drama conservative? For all its lip service to progressive stories, Downton maintains a strong conservative ideology and belief in the class system. It may well chronicle the (relatively cushy) lives of Downton’s staff, but for its writer Julian Fellowes (married to a duchess, recently made a Lord by the Conservative government, for whom he is a high profile donor) a good, sympathetic working-class person is one who is quiet, loyal and knows their place.

 In addition, the urban setting of Call the Midwife cannot compete with Downton’s display of British heritage in a series of dully-composed wide shots (when in doubt, cut to a shot of the house) made possible by co-funding from NBC Universal. I’d also suggest that Call the Midwife lacks the romantic melodrama of Downton – Jennie is a touch dull compared to Lady Mary’s repressed yearnings. Yes, melodrama, as underneath its surface veneer of ‘quality,’ Downton is popular, soapy entertainment from the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, where it sits next to X-Factor (though Fellowes could learn a lot about dialogue, serial storytelling and trusting your audience from the UK soap operas). At heart it is Gainsborough rather than Austen, with the Guardian episode blog awarding the ‘Golden eyebrow award’ for the week’s best aghast reaction shots. In Midwife the melodrama is focused around the births and deaths, rather than the interpersonal storytelling (though Chummy’s tentative romance is a delight). Whilst it offers a more skilled televisual storyteller in Heidi Thomas, Midwife lacks Downton’s heightened, messy, soap opera and sumptuous celebration of aristocracy. Poverty, sweat and tears kind of harsh the buzz, no matter how prettily it’s turned out.

**This post is part of our series, Mediating the Past, which focuses on how history is produced, constructed, distributed, branded and received through various media.

HBO’s Treme, now well into its third season, continues to occupy a borderland where lines of fiction, performance, art and journalism converge. Some characters are based on prominent figures in New Orleans such as civil rights lawyer Mary Howell, the inspiration for Toni Burnette (Melissa Leo). Other musicians, singers, chefs, and Mardi Gras Indians slide in and out of the series playing themselves. Real, composite, or invented (including the more problematic roles of cops or developers) they weave through the battered fragments that constitute the story of Hurricane Katrina, a humanitarian disaster that continues the destruction of New Orleans even as the city recovers. The hurricane remains catastrophic, but is now understood as part of an equally forceful historical flow, one defined by the legacy of power, corruption and racism. Mining the details of the hurricane embedded in the city, the producers have created a hybrid genre as they seek both accuracy and entertainment. Truth is often found in the artful, liminal spaces that dance onto the screen, propelled by the musical forces that drive the city. But the center of this narrative is always located deep in the heart of its characters, real or constructed.

Treme does not simply revisit a post-Katrina sequence of events. It tracks the mediated versions of them, underlining, commenting and critiquing previous formulations, re-inventing the story and becoming part it. Such mediations began from the start, best illustrated in a contentious exchange, after which Creighton Burnette (John Goodman) throws a newscaster’s microphone into the river. It was a strong redress to initial “disaster myth” coverage, which further victimized residents in the flooded city that Maureen Dowd characterized as “a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs.”

A main thread in season 3 also traces existing media footprints, this time augmenting an investigative expose. When freelance reporter L. P. Everett (Chris Coy) arrives in town he begins to unravel the enigma of human bone fragments strewn across the back seat of a burned-out sedan left about a block from the Fourth District Police Station. This on-going plot sequence refers to A. C. Thompson’s investigation into the police murder of Henry Glover, published in 2008 as “Body of Evidence” by ProPublica. Exposing Glover’s murder became part of a larger investigation that aired in 2010 as a Frontline Documentary “Law and Disorder.”

On Treme, the dogged Everett pores over files, connects a name to a number, cold calls potential witnesses, and gets a break on episode 4 when a law-enforcement source meets him in a café and shows him grisly pictures of the scene taken by police. Everett eventually locates the out-of-state forensic pathologist who first believed the charred remains pointed to murder. During Everett’s interview the words of the medical examiner are virtually identical to the quote in Thompson’s initial reporting, which are also spoken by the real doctor on Frontline: “When I heard he was found in a burned car I thought that was a classic homicide scenario: you kill someone and burn the body to get rid of the evidence.” A.C. Thompson’s description of meeting the source in the café reads like the set directions from Treme.

Glover was only one of the victims after Katrina, when police were told they could shoot looters. Mary Howell explains on Frontline, that the long-history of NOPD corruption and brutality resulted in the breakdown of professionalism during the hurricane. On March 31, 2011, a federal judge sentenced ex-officer David Warren to 25 years for shooting Henry Glover with an assault rifle.

When I ask Mary Howell about criminal justice depictions on Treme, she usually concludes with, “remember the program is fiction.” It is true that unlike Tony Burnette, Mary Howell did not have a husband who killed himself, and we don’t know if A. C. Thompson is really a fan of heavy metal. But when L.P. Everett jumps into the mosh pit it makes sense for the character. In these emotional and expressive spaces, fiction meets journalism.

Treme’s mediation of the past through the lens of past media can be temporally disconcerting. Episode 7, Promised Land, aired November 4^th, and depicted the third Mardi Gras after the storm, yet it is presently 7 years after Katrina. In Promised Land, Delmond Lambreaux (Rob Brown) meets Kimberly Rivers Roberts who hands him a DVD of Trouble the Water. The documentary features Roberts’ video footage of Katrina flooding her home in the Lower 9th Ward. Some viewers surely remember the film, which was widely reviewed and won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2008. Watching Delmond watch it might have been little more than intertextual nostalgia, but amid the unfinished interior of his father’s damaged home, we see it steel his commitment as he returns to sewing his Indian suit.

This season Chief Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters) is sick. Though diagnosed with lymphoma, he refuses to start chemotherapy until after Mardi Gras. He, Delmond and the gang continue sewing the suits for what may be his last walk. In Episode 4, Delmond takes him to the Musicians’ Clinic, an actual non-profit facility. (The cast and producers of Treme have been involved in fundraising for the clinic.) As they prepare for Mardi Gras, Guardians of the Flame practice their chants at LaDonna’s bar, and dance with Big Chief Howard Miller of Creole Wild West. The sequence of the Indians on Mardi Gras in episode 7 features Lambreaux meeting another Big Chief, Wallace Pardo of Golden Comanche, some of which can be seen in this video with the Neville Bros. It is a stunning visual and musical mix, true to what Chief Howard told me when I asked him about the history of the Indians last March, “You see an Indian coming, you see honor and respect. It is about bringing dignity to the people and the neighborhoods. Slavery itself was a physical and biological war. [Slaves] used Mardi Gras to celebrate joy and love of themselves.”