The controversial JFK miniseries that was cooked up by the right-wing creator of the show 24, Joel Surnow, has thankfully been given the boot by The History Channel.
In a bit of unintentional hilarity, THC says that the historical miniseries doesn't fit with their 'brand', which seems to be less history and more Pawn Stars, Ax Men and various other UFO and mystical dreck. But this is good news nonetheless.
As a reminder of the controversy, the New York Times covered it last February:
They say the "Kennedys" screenplays contain many factual errors, some benign and others less so. For example, they say the scripts refer to exit polling for the 1960 presidential election when exit polling had not yet been invented; and that President Kennedy introduced the Peace Corps during the Bay of Pigs crisis in April 1961, when in fact he signed an executive order creating the corps one month earlier.
Beyond this, they say the scripts invent scenes that never occurred, like an exchange that suggests Kennedy came up with the idea for the Berlin Wall. As Mr. Sorensen bluntly says in the video, "Every single conversation with the president in the Oval Office or elsewhere in which I, according to the script, participated, never happened."
In another scene cited, a Secret Service agent approaches the president while he is having sex in a pool with a young woman who is not his wife; in yet another, the president asks his brother Robert, "What do you do when you’re horny?" and tells him that if he doesn’t have sex with unfamiliar women "every couple of days I get migraines."
In short, "The Kennedys" "does everything in its power to demean and make them quite disgusting figures," Mr. Greenwald said. "No network or cable channel has ever done anything anywhere close to this, in the way in treats a president."
Apparently the final script didn't make the cut for The History Channel. Perhaps they're still feeling the stinging rebukes they received for airing a program several years ago that claimed Lyndon Johnson had Jack Kennedy killed. One can only surmise that the final product was the right-wing hit piece everyone was expecting. Here's the death knell:
A controversial miniseries on the Kennedy family will not air on the History Channel because the completed multimillion dollar project does not fit the "History brand," the network said.
The eight-part series drew criticism during its production from figures such as former Kennedy administration aide Theodore Sorenson, who attacked the scripts as inaccurate. The role of producer Joel Surnow, a political conservative, also drew suspicion from fans of the Kennedy family.
"We have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand," the network said in a statement late Friday. The decision was first reported Friday by the Hollywood Reporter.
History said the decision was made after viewing the entire series, which stars Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes as President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie.
Kudos need to go to Robert Greenwald for pointing out the factual errors in the original script and insisting on historical accuracy. Without his advocacy we might well have seen right-wing historical revisionism at play on the (not so much) History Channel - again.