For the 20th anniversary of 9/11, TV has countless options of docuseries remembrances. I won’t be tuning in.
The rush to produce as much September 11 #content as possible this year has an almost frantic undercurrent to it. For anyone old enough to remember it, the insistence that we Never Forget has haunted us ever since. Now there are countless 9/11 remembrances, tributes, news specials and retrospectives wanting to remind us of the devastation in granular detail, and as someone with a vivid memory of that day, I can’t imagine anything less appealing than spending its 20th anniversary watching a single one. There are docuseries about what happened on the ground (National Geographic’s “9/11: One Day in America”) and the infrastructure of the towers themselves (History Channel’s “Rise and Fall: The World Trade Center”). There are interviews with children of the deceased (PBS’ “Generation 9/11”), the stunned Bush administration (Apple TV Plus’ “9/11: Inside the President’s War Room”), and the former CIA and Afghan officials who became embroiled in the war that continues to this day (Netflix’s “Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror”). There are even retrospectives on responses from stand-up comedy (Vice TV’s “Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11”), Broadway (Apple TV Plus’ filmed version of “Come From Away”), and even college football (ESPN’s “Comeback Season — Sports After 9/11”). On Sept.11 proper, more channels than I can name will broadcast coverage for hours on end, just in case anyone might do the unforgivable and overlook which day it is for even a single second. Every announcement of new 9/11 programming renewed my creeping sense of dread, but it took watching the third episode of Spike Lee’s “NYC Epicenters” for me to understand exactly why.
