Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era from Lancaster, Pennsylvania • 9

Fridu, Jvm am 4, 2013 A7 Entertainment Joi rn New Er, Lwcwilr, Pa. Lincoln, Les Miz, PBS series tells the story of The Abolitionists earn producers nods BY DAVID WIEGAND San Francisco Chronicle PBS In a re-enactment sequence from The Abolitionists, John Brown (T. Ryder Smith), right, tries to persuade Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks), left, to join his planned assault on Harpers Ferry as Shields Green (Thomas Coleman) looks on. The three-part American Experience documentary begins airing Tuesday on PBS. LOS ANGELES (AP) The Civil War saga Lincoln, the musical Les Miserables and the Osama bin Laden thriller Zero Dark Thirty are among the nominees announced Wednesday for the top honor from the Producers Guild of America.

Other best-picture contenders are the Iran hostage-crisis thriller Argo; the low-budget critical favorite Beasts of the Southern Wild; the slave-tumed-boun-ty-hunter saga Django Unchained; the shipwreck story Life of Pi; the first-love tale Moonrise Kingdom; the lost-souls romance Silver Linings Playbook; and the James Bond adventure Sky-fall. Walt Disney dominated the guilds animation category with three of the five nominees: Brave, Fran-kenweenie and Wreck-It Ralph. The other nominees are Focus Features Para-Norman and Paramounts Rise of the Guardians. Along with honors from other Hollywood professional groups such as actors, directors and writers guilds, the producer prizes help sort out contenders for the Academy Awards. Those nommations come out Thursday.

The guild, an association of Hollywood producers, hands out its 24th annual prizes Jan. 26. The big winner often goes on to claim the best-picture honor at the Oscars, which follow on Feb. 24. Previously announced nominees by the Producers Guild for best documentary are A People Uncounted, The Gatekeepers, The Island President, The Other Dream Team and Searching for Sugar Man.

Other nommees: TV drama series: Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, Homeland, Mad Men. TV comedy series: 30 PBS Daniel Day-Lewis plays President Abraham Lincoln in a scene from Lincoln. Rock, The Big Bang Theory, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Louie, Modem Family. Long-form television: American Horror Story, The Dust Bowl, Game Change, Hatfields McCoys, Sherlock. Nonfiction television: American Masters, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Deadliest Catch, Inside the Actors Studio, Shark Tank.

Live entertainment and talk television: The Colbert Report, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Real Time with Bill Maher, Saturday Night Live. Competition television: The Amazing Race, Dancing with the Stars, Project Runway, Top Chef, The Voice. Sports program: 247, Catching Hell, The Fight with Jim Lampley, On Freddie Roach, Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. Childrens program: Good Luck Charlie, lCar-ly, Phineas and Ferb, Sesame Street, The Weight of the Nation for Kids: The Great Cafeteria Takeover. The sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamations signing is one reason to look back at the uphill battle of the movement to end slavery in the United States, and Steven Spielbergs hit film Lincoln is an- REVIEW other i cyy gut factj the movements significance to our history, both in the 19th century and well into modem times, makes it a worthy subject for the three-part American Experience documentary launching Utesday on PBS.

The Abolitionists, written and directed by Rob Ra-pley, is a barely adequate documentary blending archival images with minimally convincing re-enactments. Fortunately, the content outweighs the weakness of the filmmaking itself. Rapleys film focuses on several key members of the abolitionist movement, including author Harriet Beecher radical activist John Brown; former slave Frederick Douglass; South Carolina belle Angelina Grimke, who broke with her slave-owning family; and William Lloyd Garrison, who created the anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, as a platform for his deeply held views. From the first days of the new' republic, slavery was a complicated and complicating practice. A recent opinion piece in the New York Times vilified Thomas Jefferson for being a lifelong slave-owner.

Fellow Virginian George Washington, however, freed his slaves. By 1820, there were some 2 million slaves in the United States slavery itself was known as the peculiar institution. As the abolition movement grew as a human rights battle, it became not just about slavery, but about race as well. However, no matter how many people were drawn into its ranks over the decades, eradication of slavery ran up against an even more powerful cultural opponent economics and not just in the South, but in the North as w'ell. This wouldnt be the last time a national debate centered on human rights versus economics.

The abolitionist movement was both organized, through the American Anti-Slavery Society, and unrelenting. Yet its leaders often disagreed on the best method to rid the nation of slavery. Garrison advocated peace and persuasion, or, as Brown termed it, milk and w'ater abolitionism. Brown, the leader of the raid on Harpers Ferry, was motivated by the murder of an abolitionist in Illinois to believe that the end of slavery could be achieved only through bloodshed. Setbacks to the movement such as the Great Compromise and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, as well as the Supreme Courts decision on the Dred Scott Case that Congress could not outlaw slavery, radicalized even Garrison at one pomt to question his otherwise steadfast belief in peace and persuasion.

Over time, he came to believe the entire nation needed to start over, that the first republic, as it was known, had to die to create that more perfect union Lincoln would cite in his most famous speech. Of course, Lincoln plays a significant role in the film, but not in the way many viewers might expect. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has said there was a time that Lincolns portrait was often the only image of a white man you would find in the homes of African Hes employed experienced actors to play Garrison, Brown and the others, but because scenes rarely feel very believable, they dont contribute as much to the film as the archival photographs and other historical images. Of the actors, only Richard Brooks (Law Order, Firefly) as Douglass manages to overcome the phoniness of the settings for the re-enactments.

Sorry, but this feels often like History-Channel-lite. The film also includes a good deal of commentary from various modern-day historians, but their contributions often seem merely to repeat the information provided in Oliver Platts narration or in the hokey re-enactments. Whats largely missmg from the commentary, especially given the fact that its a three-hour documentary, is how the abolitionist movement might have impacted our history as a nation and a society beyond the Civil War. Slavery may have been eradicated, but the debate about race contmues to this day. And its roots can be found in the abolitionist movement.

But Lincoln did not start out as an abolitionist. In fact, he tried at first to placate the South on the issue of slavery to head off the Civil War and met with African American clergy in a failed attempt to convmce them to lead their people out of the country to new colonies. He even proposed allowing slavery to continue for another 40 years if the South surrendered. Rapleys film does a decent job slicing through the mythology of the abolitionist movement to show how much its leaders both worked together and disagreed while still keeping a collective eye on the prize. It also disabuses us of the notion that Lincoln was the great white hope of the abolitionist movement from the get-go.

That isnt to say he shouldnt be viewed as a hero, only that, like much of the nation, his views on slavery had to evolve, as a more recent president referred to his own views on a different rights issue. Rapleys film is watchable and informative, but the reenactments come up short. name-calling gets her suspended on Last Man Standing (8 p.m., ABC, TV-PG) Division comes under siege on Nikita (8 p.m., CW, TV-14) Reba tries to rally a schools music department on Malibu Country (8.30 p.m., ABC, TV-PG). LATE NIGHT Television Continued from A6 a new season. Designers renovate bars all over the city that made beer famous on Made in Milwaukee (11 p.m., DIY).

Remarkable set design and Cold War paranoia are the real stars of the 1957 shocker The Incredible Shrinking Man (11 p.m., TCM). CRITICS CHOICE Terrible special effects are only the beginning of the problems of the horrendous 1987 sequel Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (9 p.m., The Hub), a film on some critics worst of all time lists. SERIES NOTES On two episodes of Go On (NBC, TV-14): major leagues (8 p.m.), birthday woes (8.30 p.m.) Eves Dita Von Teese, Michael Yo, Jen Kirkman and Josh Wolf appear on Chelsea Lately (11 p.m., r) Jay Leno welcomes Courteney Cox, Joy Behar and Youngblood Hawke on The Tonight Show (11.35 p.m., NBC). Mel Brooks, Jake Tapper and Jason Aldean appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live (midnight, ABC, r). Bill Cosby, Tempestt Bledsoe and Grace Potter chat on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (12.35 a.m NBC) Craig Ferguson visits Glamis Castle in Scotland on The Late Late Show (12:35 a.m., CBS, r).

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