It's definitely worth watching! It is one of my favorite documentary series and I often recommend it to people who are interested in learning more about the Cold War. It is also great for use in teaching the Cold War to undergraduates or high school students, in my experience.

A few things that speak for it:

• The level of access and interviewing is very good. It mixes high and low very well in this respect — you get the heads of the CIA, KGB, etc. (ex-Presidents, ex-Soviet premieres, etc. as well), but you also get the little guy, the person whose life was up-ended by the Stasi or Vietnam or the Soviet-Afghan War. They run the gamut and do a very good job of presenting a very wide spectrum of history. It is neither Great Man nor just Cultural History. It does all of them.

• The depth is great because there are so many episodes. Each one is wonderfully focused, even though they are part of a general theme and progression. The later episodes are a bit better than the earlier ones at this (I particularly like the ones on the coups in Latin America, the Stasi, and the Soviet-Afghan War, because they are very well-contained and a good mix of high and low), but they're all pretty good.

• Geographically it is pretty well represented. While the US-Soviet conflict is the organizing structure, it also does a pretty good job of representing the third world, both in terms of proxies but also on their own terms. So their coverage of Guatemala, for example, emphasizes that while they were in some sense pawns in the greater Cold War, it also emphasizes the autonomy of the people there and the fact that they had their own local agendas. That's an easy thing to get wrong, and they get it pretty right.

• It was made at a pretty interesting period. If it had been made in 1993 or so you'd get a very different story, and if it had been made post-2001 you'd obviously get a terribly different story. It was made in 1998 and that proves to make it reflective enough on the Cold War to be thoughtful, without reading everything through a lens of of the post-9/11 era.

• As for historical accuracy — some of what they knew then, we know a bit more about now, to be sure. I've yet to see a documentary that gets everything exactly right. The places in which this one shines are where it allows the historical actors to represent their points of view — and shows you that depending on where you are, you see things very differently. That's a historical lesson that transcends the specifics of whether their interpretation of the origins of the Korean War is exactly how we interpret it today. There are plenty of things that a knowledgable historian can criticize in how it does things, but I think its value lies outside of its specifics and more with its subjects and the fact that it gives such a big sweep of things.