What's not to like about fall?

       All four pro sports are going which is either a blessing or a distraction, depending on your point of view.    The air is crisp and refreshing.   Leaves put on their annual show.     Kids are back in school and the daily routine is enjoined once again.    At night, there are new shows to discover and old favorites to celebrate.

      And, if you're a JFK assassination freak like me, it means a new spate of documentaries.

      The History Channel seems to churn out a couple of new ones almost every month.    They cranked out two in October, and there's one I really, really like.

        "JFK: 3 Shots That Changed America" is a rather wooden title for such a fresh look at what happened the day Kennedy died as well as the days, months and years that followed.    What makes it different is that there's no narration: the events are shown as they happened, through the lenses of the cameras that were there.     The link above will take you to YouTube where you can watch as much of the series as you want.

       Included are reporter stand ups and out-takes, like the one a very young Dan Rather does in the days before JFK's Texas arrival.       There's off-air stuff, too, showing what was happening as cameras rolled and no one was watching.     One such instance provides an eerie bit of foreshadowing--a reporter does a stand-up inside the Dallas Police Department, showing Oswald complaining as he's being led to a line-up the day after the assassination.     The tape keeps rolling after the shot is done and the camera is being pulled into a hallway.   As the lens swirls as it dollies away, you see the spot where Oswald would be murdered by Jack Ruby in less than a day, before that mundane hallway would serve as a backdrop to history.

       You see the chaos in the corridors of the police department as reporters are given unfettered access to Oswald while in custody...the very thing that allowed a guy like Jack Ruby to blend into the mob and kill Oswald two days after his arrest.    You hear his denials, see his attitude, and are left wondering why the accused assassin's  constant requests for legal counsel are ignored right up to his murder.    

       What you DON'T get is anyone's after-the-fact assessment.    The reporters and analysts you see and hear are in the moment, doing their job as the event was happening.    You'll hear things that history would later prove wrong, and you'll see others that are still being debated to this very day.

       It's four hours long, and the first two are the strongest, starting in the days before JFK got to Dallas and ending with Oswald's shooting.     Part Two goes from his death to where we are today.    It's still a better than decent documentary and a revealing look at how t-v did it's job when cameras were still on wheels, pictures were still black-and-white, and newspapers were still considered the news source of record.

      Don't go in expecting the same old video and newsreel clips you've seen over and over again.    I thought I'd seen it all until I watched "3 Shots".     The most jaded assassination buff will find new stuff here, and I think the documentary is compelling enough so that even the marginally interested will hang, at least for the first two hours.

      Give it a try when you aren't dealing with leaves, or if you've gone through everything on your DVR.   It's not feel-good television, to be sure, but I think you'll be glad you saw it.       It's an old story, told by the same eyes but with a very different perspective.