UNC TV to Produce Two Documentaries on
North Carolina’s World War II Experience

At the UNC-TV Board of Trustees meeting today plans were announced for North Carolina’s statewide public television network to produce two one-hour documentaries about North Carolina’s World War II Experience. The programs will be a companion project to the much-awaited 14-hour documentary series by celebrated PBS documentarian Ken Burns called The War, scheduled for broadcast nationally and on UNC-TV in September 2007. UNC-TV’s efforts to raise funds for this production have resulted in nearly $150,000 that can be committed to the cash costs for the documentaries, and the network will invest over $300,000 in facilities and personnel to produce the shows.

The programs will be an in-depth examination of how North Carolina and its citizens experienced World War II – not only those who fought the war overseas, but from the standpoint of the large military presence in the state and how the war was experienced on the home front. Currently, the first broadcast of this work is planned for the fall of 2009.

Leading the project for UNC-TV will be UNC-TV’s Executive Producer Scott Davis, an award-winning television producer, and independent producer Brenda Hughes, who produced the Emmy Award-winning Thank You, Eddie Hart, which was originally broadcast on UNC-TV.

Welcoming the announcement, Robert D. Teer of Teer Associates, one of the primary funders of the project, said: “I decided to support UNC-TV’s ‘North Carolina WWII Experiences’ because every day that goes by we miss a chance to chronicle what this generation did for our state and country. We must preserve this history and we must do it with the people who lived it.”

Charlie Smith, Director of the North Carolina Veterans Affairs, who has been advising UNC-TV on its World War II initiative, agreed, saying “It is certainly good news that at last someone will be telling the story of how North Carolina and North Carolinians contributed to one of the great accomplishments in our nation’s history. By that I mean not only the obvious contributions of the war veterans themselves, but of the families back home, the military bases in North Carolina, and really how the whole country mobilized for a common purpose.”

Member-supported UNC-TV is North Carolina’s statewide public television network, providing a family of digital channels, including UNC-HD, featuring all high-definition programming, UNC-KD, a children’s channel, UNC-NC, with North Carolina-oriented content, and UNC-ED, with educational and “how-to” programming.

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