Production of a two-part, four-hour television series about the Korean War that places the international conflict in historical context and considers its geopolitical and military legacies.
The 38th Parallel is a proposed four-hour documentary series about a war that Americans have long underestimated, misunderstood, and misrepresented. The Korean War was a gigantic global event: twenty-four nations took part in a conflict that lasted three full years. The war killed four million people. Even so, Korea has been almost-famously forgotten by the American public. Bookended by World War II and Vietnam, the Korean War marked little that anyone in this country wanted to remember and a great deal that everyone wanted to forget. It was a brutal conflict that put the first dent in the myth of American exceptionalism and brought the world close to a nuclear war. But the Korean War needs to be remembered. It determined American military and foreign policy for the next 60 years; the world we live in today, where the US all but routinely intervenes in far-off conflicts, was born with Korea. The Korean War changed everything.