The first episode of Ric's Burns New York unfortunately set the tone for
the rest of the series.  His stereotypical characterization of the Dutch
was offensive at best, and downright crude and ignorant.  Had the same
things been said about any other people, he would be facing a serious law
suit. Indeed, the entire series pandered to a stereotyping of all New
Yorkers (though not always so negatively) throughout the city's history
into neat little packages, depending on today's popular political
correctness. New Yorkers of all groups and classes have from the very
beginning been an immensely complex people that defy easy catagorization.
The first two-hundred years of the city's history was crammed into two
hours and showed an almost absolute ignorance of the period and the
scholarship on it. Popular, and incorrect myths, such as Lord Cornbury's
cross-dressing, were presented as fact. Particularly insulting was the use
of visual caricatures from Washington Irving's satiric works as if they
were historical representations of Dutch New Amsterdam. Although Mr. Burns
thesis seemed to be that New York City was the great democratic testing
ground (though evidence is that class differences have always been huge in
the city, and that the descendants of the city's 17th-century Anglo-Dutch
oligarchy continue to exert a powerful influence today), virtually nothing
positive seemed to have occurred in New York City with the exception of an
insatiable "greed."  Yet, the very legal foundations for the freedoms we
enjoy in America today were often first fought in New York City. There was
no mention of the battles between Stuyvesant and the Lutherans, Jews, and
Quakers in their appeals for religious toleration, which the minority
religions won precisely because of the Dutch constitution and not because
of the "greed" of the West India Company; the Leisler Rebellion was glossed
over and the show's assessment of it as an uprising against the English
rather than as a part of England's Glorious Revolution was totally
incorrect and its impact on the city's development should have been futher
explored; there was no mention of the John Peter Zenger trial, which
established freedom of the press.  And one could go on and on.  Indeed,
many of the institutions which continue to shape New York today, such as
New York Hospital, Columbia University, etc., had their formation in this
period, yet were barely touched at all.  Moreover, no colonial city has a
greater amount of surviving contemporary visual materials from which to
draw, which Mr. Burns seemed particularly ignorant of.  His use of the 1730
Carthwian view of the city with an American flag pasted on it to represent
the city after the Revolution is but one silly example.

One can appreciate that only so much can be covered in brief program space,
and that selectivity in putting together the presentation is always going
to offend someone who would like their particular interest receive fuller
coverage.  But to mislead the public with stereotypes is a more serious
problem that this program suffered from.