Everything's Coming Up Roosevelts

With our typical devil-may-care television-watching verve, Mr. Rip and I agreed that we might want to catch "The Roosevelts: an Intimate History." We both always found the Roosevelts to be a particularly fascinating and plucky American family, so why wouldn't we want to watch an in-depth documentary covering that great triumvirate of Roosevelts- Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor (oh, my!) -brought to us by that documentary wunderkind himself Ken Burns.

“You know this is a two-hour commitment,” Mr. Rip warned me, remote control in hand.

No problem, I assured him.  We often watched two-hour programs and while it’s true we didn’t make it through them all awake, we simply caught what we missed later.

Partway through the hour-long preview show it really sunk in that what we were really committing to was 7 nights of 2-hour installments – we were going to be watching 14 hours of this documentary.  It would be like watching the story of the Roosevelts in real time.

We were learning a lot just watching the preview.  We learned that the voice of Teddy would be played by Paul Giamatti.  Oh, okay, he was great as John Adams.  They were thrilled when Edward Herrmann signed on to voice FDR.  Of course, he is the go-to actor to play that part. And none other than the one-and-only Meryl Streep would be Eleanor.  What, Mr. Rip asked, Jane Alexander wasn’t available? Oh, and Ken Burns has a really bad haircut – it’s pretty much an early-Beatles mop top.

So, we were in and there was no turning back.  Well now these first two hours of the documentary were very, very interesting in a historical sort of way.  Franklin and Eleanor were very young in this installment, suffering through difficult childhoods, but Teddy was U.S. President by the end of the show.  Burns was really quite thorough – not one little detail was missed.  Seriously, he included everything.

When it was over, Mr. Rip went into the kitchen for a minute, and I saw that there was still 30 minutes of the Miss America Pageant left to air.  Mr. Rip doesn’t like the Miss America Pageant but I thought it wouldn’t hurt anything to watch it until he came back into the room.

As luck would have it, I turned it on in the middle of the Talent Competition.  Mr. Rip wandered back into the room just as Miss Ohio was starting her ventriloquist act, where her dummy and she sang Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

“A ventriloquist?  What is this?”  Mr. Rip asked, “The Ed Sullivan Show?”   But even he had to admit that Miss Ohio was pretty good.

There was a classical pianist, two interpretive dancers, and a singer singing Ben E. King.  It really was like The Ed Sullivan Show.

Then Miss New York sang Pharrell William’s Happy while sitting cross-legged on the floor accompanying herself by playing percussion with a plastic red cup on the floor.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Miss New York played that red cup all the way to the crown – she was later crowned Miss America.  Whatever. I was rooting for the ventriloquist.

I don’t why Mr. Rip never wants to watch these shows.  There were more laughs in 15 minutes of the Miss America Pageant Talent Competition than there were in three hours of the Roosevelts.