I've written a meta review on Burns' work before, which I'll revisit here with some slight revision:

Reposting a prior response of mine (with a few additions and tweaks)

This isn't a review, in the proper sense, of Ken Burns' great Civil War epic. I don't think anyone has the time to watch that whole thing and do a proper take down of factual and conceptual errors which, as noted here, it is often rife with. And if I'm being honest, the last time I watched the thing, it was on VHS anyways. Rather, this is a META Review, analyzing what other people have said on the matter. Certainly there are more reviews out there than the ones that I used, but I tried to keep it varied, just opening them up in the order that I found them rather than trying to pick and choose ones I agreed with best, but even so you will see that there are some very consistent threads across reviews.

Ken Burns' "Civil War" is certainly considered to be a masterpiece by the viewing public, but not necessarily by the academics. Earlier this year, PBS rebroadcast the series in conjunction with its 25th Anniversary, and you can find plenty of praise both then and now. One piece run by The Guardian subtitles itself "America's Greatest Documentary", while Newsday terms the series "a visceral, deeply felt film on a long-distant war that lived on in hearts and minds." Perhaps no higher praise, for the film buff, can be given than that of the Baltimore Sun which proclaimed it the Citizen Kane of documentary film. But you can also find more balanced analysis, as a number of articles focus on the enduring controversy of the series, which, in the words of the LA Times, "has been criticized from time to time by historians who say it distorted or ignored important events". Burns himself mostly brushes off such criticisms:

We had a sort of dust-up in the first few years after the series: 'It didn't do this,' 'it didn't do that,'" Burns said. "That's music to my ears. … If you make an 11 1/2-hour film on 'The Civil War' … and people are telling you what you've left out, you just feel terrific because they're betraying their own biases. But nobody's saying, 'It's boring.'

and goes on to state that he believes his series has done wonders to enliven teaching of a topic students might otherwise lack any interest in, reitrated in an interview he gave to the *Journal of American History:

I believe you [professional historians] have failed and lost touch absolutely in the communication of history to the public and that it has fallen to the amateur historians, if you will, to try to rescue that history; I would hope that the academy could change course and join a swelling chorus of interest in history for everyone. [...] I was never taught what happened in the Civil War. I was taught causes, and then I was taught effects. And [yet] this happens to be a war in which the outcome of battles mattered . . . and the only people who seemed to know something about it were the military historians.

And to be sure, there are many papers covering the topic of how to utilize the series in the classroom as an educational tool (although to be sure, recommendations include critical analysis in most cases). But even some educators do take issue with that. Writing in Slate, James M. Lundberg, an assistant professor at Lake Forest, notes that while the enduring popularity of the film fills seats in his Civil War class, it can at times be "a deeply misleading and reductive film that often loses historical reality in the mists of Burns' sentimental vision and the romance of Foote's anecdotes." Burns "performs an impressive kind of alchemy",

Working in the soft glow of nostalgia, he manages to take a knotty and complex history of violence, racial conflict, and disunion and turn it into a compelling drama of national unity, [....] [and] perfectly calibrated to please most every constituency in the post-Vietnam culture wars.

He also raises the oft-mentioned issue of Shelby Foote, the novelist-turned-historian most famous for his three-part narrative history on the war, which itself is subject to its share of criticism. Foote especially pushes the unity narrative as Lundberg sees it, "[asking] us to put aside the very troubled political meanings of the Confederate Lost Cause and join him in an appreciation of both its courtly leaders and its defiant rank-and-file soldiers." Foote has particularly been criticized for his archaic views on Civil War historiography, which in no small part include the marginalization of slavery as a cause in the war. As noted by Christopher Sharrett, in an interview not included in the final cut but available in the extra material:

Although Foote mentions Southern concern about "property," he discounts slavery as a cause of the war. Here he makes some astonishing statements. In an archival interview included with supplements in The Civil War's new edition, Foote says that slavery was "an issue" but was used "almost as a propaganda thing," and that "those who wanted to exploit it could grab onto it." He also says that slavery was "doomed to extinction" and that "some plan of compensation would have worked in time ." There is no evidence whatsoever to support these remarks, and in fact the opposite is very basic to understanding Confederate secession.

Foote is controversial in his own right, and not just in association with the series (Where he, it should be noted, "spoke 7,653 words compared to the second highest speaker, who spoke 1,112 words" and has '73.5' percent of all narration). His novels, such as Shiloh, and his hefty trilogy The Civil War: A Narrative are classics for their immersive prose, but even eliding over the criticism of his work, Foote considered himself a novelist first, and an historian second - something that would make many historians probably say “no shit” given the laissez faire attitude he took towards footnotes and anecdotes in his work, to which he simply responded:

I have left out footnotes, believing that they would detract from the book's narrative quality by intermittently shattering the illusion that the observer is not so much reading a book as sharing an experience.

His method, obviously, was quite in contrast to accepted historiography even at the time, and it has only aged worse. Afterall, I’ve heard it said he never met an anecdote he didn’t like, and whatever the appeal of narrative history to the general public - I love a good pop narrative now and then myself - the underlying drive behind it can be a dangerous one, both in Foote’s books as well as as we see here with Burns. It captures the imagination of the audience, but it poisons interpretation, and becomes infected by the story that the teller wishes to make of it, which necessarily separates it from an objective retelling to a great degree. George Garrett puts it well when speaking of Foote’s writing that “[narrative history] engages the imagination first,” in comparison to conventional history, which fails to similarly engage, "forever distorted by known outcomes".

Born and raised in the South, while he may in theory have decried the myth of the Lost Cause, it is hard not see the story he crafts nevertheless being thoroughly infected with it by proxy if nothing else, grounded in a perspective of the war that has been mostly killed off since he was writing by newer scholarship such as McPherson or Gallagher, neither of whom would write something like:

the victors acknowledged that the Confederates had fought bravely for a cause they believed was just and the losers agreed it was probably best for all concerned that the Union had been preserved.

And although the vivid prose which is the biggest draw of the work truly does make it a piece of art, it is the same factor which detracts from the objectivity of the narrative, as many a review has noted, as in one case, “understanding and love, capturing the distinctive qualities of a Southerner [Lee] he never ceases to admire.” While perhaps rejecting the most monstrous aspects of Lost Cause sympathy, he certainly could not totally separate himself from the romantic hold that the period hold on so many, noting, for instance, on the 2001 Mississippi flag vote:

I'm for the Confederate flag always and forever. Many among the finest people this country has ever produced died in that war. To take it and call it a symbol of evil is a misrepresentation.

He ‘laments’ how the educated members of Southern society, “allowed white supremacists to misuse their flag” as a symbol of hate in the 1960s in his talks with the author Tony Horwitz, but seems to lack anything approaching a nuanced perspective of the issue, which Grace Elizabeth Hale notes is a sad irony, since as a young man, his published correspondence with the writer Walker Percy demonstrated a “much more nuanced and critical stance toward segregationists” during the 1950s and ‘60s, which he seems to have lost in his old age, describing the Freedom Riders now as having “odd haircuts and strange baggy clothes”, and giving what she sums up as a “peculiar take on Civil War remembrance”.

To return to the main topic at hand, the series has its boosters when addressing whether it leans too close into "Lost Cause" narrative however, and whether it is brushing over the centrality of slavery even if Foote might like to. Summarized in the LA Times, Joan Waugh, an historian at UCLA, "sees the Burns film as a valuable part of a cultural trend that has placed the battle over slavery and emancipation as key to understanding the Civil War [and] along with the Oscar-winning film "Glory," countered those interpretations by putting slavery — America's "original sin," as some have called it — front and center in talking about the conflict and its aftermath."

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