Delayed Reaction: Best of Enemies

The Pitch: A look into the televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley in 1968.

This is one of those "perfect storm" documentaries that I'll catch sometimes. I recently watched the CNN series The Sixties and have been digging deep into election strategies for 2016. Then, I stumble on this documentary about political discourse in the 1960s. I knew nothing about any of it. I recognize Vidal in name only and kinda sorta recognize Buckley. So, this was all new to me although about a topic that interested me a lot. That's pretty ideal for a documentary.

I was impressed by the number of topics that this moved between. There's the competition among the news networks of the time, with ABC lagging behind NBC and CBS. It does a wonderful job of painting Vidal and Buckley as opposite sides of the same coin. Then there's how their debates during the Presidential conventions in 1968 changed the course of political discussion on TV.

Mostly, I was impressed by how the documentary didn't take sides. I'm not a fan of watching a documentary when I feel like I'm only being told half the story. It's why Making a Murderer didn't connect with me and why I stopped Blackfish midway through. It would've been easy to make a version of this that villainous Buckley in favor of Vidal after the infamous "Don't call me a crypto-nazi" line. That's not what this does though. It tries to give context to it all, which made it much more interesting.

This doesn't transcend the documentary format in the way that something like The Imposter does, but for anyone at all interested in the subject matter, it's entertaining.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend