Forget the National Parks, Ken Burns’s New Doc is Eighteen Hours of Someone’s Ancestry.com Search
Listen, I know we’re all supposed to genuflect at the altar of Ken Burns. The man is basically the American equivalent of a national monument, but made out of sweater vests and melancholy cello music. We get it. He makes history feel like a long, slow drive through a cemetery you didn’t know you were related to. But his latest “masterpiece” is a bridge too far. He’s finally done it. He’s made a documentary so sprawling, so painfully granular, that it feels like he just asked ChatGPT to “write the most boring 18-hour movie possible about a guy who invented a slightly better snow shovel.”
I’m talking, of course, about *The American Snow Shovel: A Ken Burns Film*.
Before you roll your eyes into the back of your skull, I’m not kidding. And it’s not a metaphor for Manifest Destiny or the Gilded Age. It’s literally. About. The. Snow. Shovel. The wooden one. The metal one. The plastic one that breaks immediately. All of it.
The trailer dropped last week, and I swear to God, it’s the most aggressively beige thing I have ever seen. It opens with a slow, mournful pan across a field of white snow. A single, rusted shovel stands upright, like a lonely sentinel. Then, the voice of Peter Coyote, that unholy audio priest of American nostalgia, intones: “It was a tool. A simple thing of wood and iron. But for a generation of Americans, it was… everything.”
Bro. It’s a shovel. You use it to move the frozen water from the driveway to the lawn. You don’t need a five-part series on its socioeconomic impact on the Rust Belt.
The article I just read on PBS’s website (yes, I had to actually look this up to confirm my own sanity) describes the film as an “immersive, decade-spanning exploration of labor, immigration, and the American dream as seen through the common snow shovel.” They’re already calling it “the most Ken Burns thing Ken Burns has ever done.” And yeah, that’s the problem. It’s so Ken Burns that it’s become a parody of itself.
Let’s break down what you can expect in this cinematic NyQuil:
**Act I: The Wooden Era (1840-1900)**
We get 45 minutes of a single black-and-white photograph of a guy in a top hat holding a wooden shovel. The camera slowly zooms in on his mustache hairs for 15 minutes while a historian from Yale explains that the “affordable snowfall” of the 1880s led to a boom in manual labor. There are interviews with the great-grandchildren of the shovel’s inventor, who talk about how their ancestor “never patented the design because he believed in community.” Spoiler: He was just broke and bad at business.
**Act II: The Steel Revolution (1900-1950)**
This is where things get “dark.” Apparently, the shift from wood to steel caused a massive labor dispute in Schenectady, New York. We get a slow-motion reenactment of a man scraping ice off his porch. The music swells. Peter Coyote says, “The snow didn’t care about your union card.” It’s supposed to be profound. It’s a guy cleaning his walkway. I’ve had more emotional depth from a TikTok of a dog failing to catch a ball.
**Act III: The Plastic Plague (1950-Present)**
This is the “tragic” third act. We see the rise of the cheap, orange, plastic scoop. Burns treats this like the invention of the atomic bomb. He interviews a “snow removal ethicist” who argues that plastic shovels “disconnected us from the sacred labor of winter.” There’s a 20-minute segment on the environmental impact of broken plastic shovels in landfills. It’s a shovel, my guy. It’s not the Deepwater Horizon spill.
The worst part? The reviews are already calling it “essential viewing.” One critic from The New Yorker wrote, “Burns has once again found the universal in the particular, reminding us that the history of a nation is written in its most mundane objects.” No. Just no. The history of a nation is written in its wars, its pandemics, its civil rights movements. Not in the thing you use to get your Honda Civic out of a snowbank so you can go to Target.
This is peak boomer-centric media. It’s for people who think that watching a 12-hour documentary about a spoon is a “productive weekend.” It’s the cultural equivalent of a rocking chair. It’s slow, it’s comfortable, and it’s going nowhere.
And the interviews. Oh, the interviews. There’s a guy who “collects antique snow shovels.” He has a basement full of them. He talks about the “patina of use” on a 1923 model. He is not being ironic. He is dead serious. There is a woman who says her grandfather “invented the D-handle grip” and that he was “a visionary robbed by history.” History didn’t rob him, Karen. Home Depot just made a better one.
The cherry on top? The film is produced by General Motors. Because of course it is. Nothing says “authentic American history” like a corporation that’s trying to distract you from the fact that their SUVs are the reason you need a shovel in the first place.
So, AITA for thinking Ken Burns has finally jumped the shark? That *The American Snow Shovel* is the moment we admit that his whole “slow cinema for history buffs” shtick has turned into a self-indulgent circle jerk for people who have too much time and not enough actual problems?
I’m not saying we should burn the books. I’m saying we should burn the VHS tapes. We get it, Ken. The past is sad. The banjo is playing. The
Final Thoughts
Having spent decades watching Burns’s work, I’ve come to see that his real genius isn’t just in the archival footage or the familiar music—it’s in his stubborn insistence that history is a moral argument, not a dry recitation of dates. He forces us to sit with the contradictions of the American experiment, from heroic struggle to brutal failure, without offering easy comfort. Ultimately, that’s why his films endure: they remind us that democracy isn’t a finished product, but a painfully unfolding story we’re all still writing.