A lot of documentaries are made by filmmakers, and not historians. Many tend to have a Rankeien view of history. Also overly dramatized Reenactments I find sometimes take away from the history. They're also not necessarily peer reviewed. That said, there are many good documentaries, and many of them are shown on pbs. Primary sources in my opinion are always best, but to get an overview of a unfamiliar topic documentaries are a great tool. Just always make sure they're actual history professors and not authors without any formal History education or peer review.

Look at the credits, where it should list the names of all the academics with bookcase backgrounds that are in a stereotypical documentary. Good documentaries will likely have their own historical consultants, too, who may have graduate degrees of their own. Many academic presses work this way, too - it's hard to edit an expert's book on French history if you don't have some expertise in French history. Googling credentials is good. If they're a professor of such-and-such at somewhere more reputable than DeVry and/or published something through an academic press (e.g. Yale University Press), they're probably okay.

The tricky thing with history is that historians are not in agreement with each other all the time on their interpretations of the past. Things like "The French Revolution happened" are indisputable, but answering questions like "How did the French Revolution affect modern France?" are not so easily answered. So listen to what the experts in the documentaries are saying, and think about if there might be another explanation for the thing they're discussing. If the French Revolution is something particularly interesting to you, you're in luck because it is one of the most talked about periods in history. Just glance quickly at this and you'll see the issues surrounding it are not clear cut at all.

Check out Ben Alper's blog posting for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. He's a professor at the Honor's College at the University of Oklahoma and addresses a couple thing that may interest you.

See also

Hayden White, "Historiography and Historiophoty,", AHR Forum

Brian LeBeau (review essay). "Historiography Meets Historiophoty:The Perils and Promiseof Rendering the Past on Film." American Studies (not 100% on the journal title)

TL;DR. Verify sources, think about the things being said.

Hope this helps a little. Happy Reading!

The problem with many documentaries that interview experts is that the filmmaker can edit the interviews however they see fit. An infamous example of this (albeit not a history-related one) is What the Bleep Do We Know?, a new-age "documentary" from 2004 that proposed that all of existence is constructed from ideas and conscious thought, and justified this with a pseudoscientific interpretation of quantum physics.

The film notably interviews several physicists and other scientists, some of whom were interviewed about their field in a non new-age context and whose words were later selectively edited to make it seem like they supported the film's premise.

The worst example of a history-related documentary doing this that I can think of is Zeitgeist, which proposes (among other things) a lot of untrue claims about the historicity of Jesus, including falsely asserting he has some relationship with the Egyptian deity Horus.

The best documentaries that are shown on television are normally on publicly-funded channels, such as PBS or the BBC. While there have been good documentaries on History Channel, I'd take what you see on there with a grain of salt, and double-check anything you learn with other sources.

While looking up credentials of experts is a worthwhile endeavor, you should also keep in mind that documentaries very often present only one narrative concerning the subject matter. While this can reflect the consensus of historians it doesn't necessarily have to and even if it does, it will leave things out that don't fit that narrative.

Another thing that irks me sometimes is the treatment of contemporary witnesses. Using personal testimony is something that adds a personal oftentimes emotional layer to things that happened in the past, but can be truly misleading if not outright wrong. As a rule of thumb I suggest you check whether such testimony is used to illustrate an already established fact rather than as a premise from which generalization are inferred. There is this apocryphal quote from a historian I like to toss in here: "The biggest enemy of historians is the contemporary witness." It's obviously cynical but contains a kernel of truth.

Along the same lines, are Ken Burns documentaries generally considered accurate and well researched?

Are you my old historiography prof?!

The biggest thing to look for is source work, as is true with all forms of historiography. After that--bias. Being able to recognize context and bias is a crucial tool in any historian's arsenal.

It's worth keeping in mind that even if the academics being interviewed have good credentials, the filmakers are still in total control of what parts of the interview the audience hears. It's amazing what you can do with creative editing in order to twist what someone's saying to suit your agenda or narrative. This goes the same with eyewitness accounts. Watch out especially for interview segments which are suspiciously short, contain lots of jump-cuts, or cut the interviewee off mid-sentence.

I've been interviewed for several documentaries, with some being better than others.

The tricky thing here is that just because an academic participates in something does not mean that a) their views are fully captured, or b) that they approve of anything else said in the documentary. I have never been asked to approve any documentary before it airs — what they do is come and film me for several hours, answering a LOT of questions, and then cut that into the 30 seconds of me talking that you see in the final product. And whether that 30 seconds captures what I actually even said depends on how they've edited it. And this assumes good faith, not Discovery channel style misrepresentation (they have notoriously edited academics to make them seem like they are saying something entirely different than they actually believed — they should be boycotted entirely in my opinion).

Personally I can barely watch any of these ones I've been part of, even if they are good, because I wince when I see how they've chopped off the end of my sentence, making its meaning a little less clear. I get why they have to do it — they have limited time and space and I could certainly be a bit more brief — but it is painful to see ones points obscured.

Personally I think historical documentaries are a very difficult genre to be considered "reliable." The copy is usually written by a director/producer and the director/producer may or may not have any knowledge of the subject or even very much interest in it. And those who are interested might have axes to grind. Even my own limited experience has shown huge variations.

Just to give you an example on editing — I was once asked if I would be willing to be on an episode of Ancient Aliens devoted to the (ridiculous) theories about there having been nuclear weapons used in the ancient world. (Dumb theory, don't ask.) Now they knew that I was not going to say this theory had any credibility. But I obviously declined, because they could easily set me up, e.g. "Is it possible than people in ancient India could have developed nuclear weapons?" "It just isn't possible that people in ancient India could have developed nuclear weapons." (They usually have you state your answer in a way so that they can cut out the question later.) Sounds, good, right? But what if that's all they put of me in there, and then cut to the guy with the big hair, or just a narrator, who says, "And so, if there is evidence that nuclear weapons went off in ancient India, and I believe there is, then we must conclude that aliens provided them. QED." Now I am in the unenviable position of at a bare minimum giving inadvertent and accident support to a really stupid theory, or, at worst, looking like I endorse it. Unless I had some kind of legal control over how my words and image would be used (and they would never give me that), there is no possible way I would not be at the mercy of the editor/producer.

My favorite historical documentaries are ones which focus on the subjective experiences of one or two people. Errol Morris' Fog of War is great — it is powerful, it gets you inside the head of an important historical figure, and it provides some stunning illumination to many big historical questions. But even it has huge historical misrepresentations at times, because McNamara is allowed to tell the story his own way, and McNamara's versions of things (e.g. the Cuban Missile Crisis) are tailored to a very specific message he wants to get across, not necessarily historical truth.

A wife variety of sources is important both for balance and to ascertain consensus.

How the argument is framed - take the war of 1812 for example, if the objective was to defend Canada and the US is seen as a belligerent then it is a British victory, if the objective is seen as the reversion of certain British policies to the US then it is an American victory, if the objective is defined as a change in territory, no one won. In each the conclusion is wildly differently only through how victory is defined.

Clear and concise information which is unembellished - as soon as flourishes of adjectives are used that should sound alarm bells. Numbers usually help but these should be in context.

Finally remember as the viewer that what you are listening to is less the absolute truth and more a perspective and opinion, which may be wrong.

Sort of off-topic, but has anyone here watched the documentary (dramamentary?) Serbia in the Great War (don't know if there's english subs available), produced by the RTS last year? Any comments?