I am bored of documentaries, I just got done watching Planet Earth and I think checking out something historical will be a good change of pace from the nature docs and character studies I usually watch. I'm looking for something that deals with just about anything world history, has good cinematography, and most importantly of all does a good job of explaining the source material. All suggestions are appreciated, thank you.
I would recommend Lectures instead of documentaries. A good lecturer is far more interesting then most documentaries anyway. The cinematography want be as good, but honestly, I have never really seen a documentary that is good at giving Source material either.
There are different lectures online, there are free platforms from different Universities and other collections. Notable ones are edx.org and coursera.org. They are not really great at History stuff, but they have some.
A better option, if you are willing to pay is thegreatcoursesplus.com. Its like Netflix for Lectures and has a basically unlimited amount of high quality history lectures.
I'm a fan of CNN's 1998 Cold War series. It's very well done, has incredible interviews, and each episode is very carefully bounded on a specific issues/place/event. At 24 episodes, it'll keep you occupied for a long time, yet it covers the global Cold War pretty well. As a work of history, like most documentaries it has its issues. But it's not pernicious. It is really quite amazing, especially with the remove of 20 years, when one "knows" what will happen afterwards (the episode on the Soviet-Afghan War is amazing to watch with the knowledge of 9/11 in mind).
Separately, Errol Morris's The Fog of War (2003), which won the Oscar for Best Documentary, is amazing. It's just a long interview with Robert McNamara, but it's also so much more than that.