I was not able to watch the second part of the Frontline/American Experience documentary The Mormons when it was broadcast. However, last Friday I watched it on online on the documentary’s website at http://www.pbs.org/mormons/view/ . You can read my review of Part 1 here .
One of my complaints about the first part of the documentary was the lack of transparency regarding the orientation of each speaker toward the church. To their credit, however, PBS has published at least partial transcripts of many of the interviews from which they took excerpts for the documentary, including some exceptional interviews with Elder Jeffrey Holland of the Twelve Apostles, and church historian and member of the seventy Elder Marlin Jensen . You can read other partial transcripts as well as additional information about many of the participants at http://www.pbs.org/mormons/interviews/ . PBS deserves at least some credit for this attempt at transparency, even though they should have published the transcripts of all of the interviews and the transcripts in their entirety.
Naturally, there has been a lot of buzz among latter-day saints about the two part documentary produced on PBS by The American Experience and Frontline about The Mormons. Latter-day saints have somewhat of a persecution complex (and not without some good reasons) so of course there has been a lot of speculation about just how balanced this particular documentary would be. I think that a lot of the speculation has been relatively optimistic.
If you missed it or want to re-watch parts of it, the documentary is available online at http://www.pbs.org/mormons/view/ .
Monday night I watched the first two-hour installment and had mixed feelings about it. I have yet to watch the second installment and will post a review when I have.
