Complex, intelligent, and sobering; superb television

Based on The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), Lawrence Wright's exhaustively researched and critically acclaimed winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (2007), whilst the book is about how al-Qaeda succeeded (with a lot of time spent delineating just why they hated American culture so much), the TV show is about how the US failed. It's a story of arrogance, incompetence, ignorance, and tragic inevitability. And although the binary of CIA=bad/FBI=good is more than a little reductionist, and whilst there's a real dearth of information on al-Qaeda itself, this is a deeply sobering series, which is at its infuriating best when it shows us, as it does time and again, just how easily these globe-altering events could have been prevented.

For my complete review, please visit: https://boxd.it/NXgFX