Ken Burns Adding Cubs World Series Episode To 'Baseball' Doc Series

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jan 16, 2017 4:35PM

Cub Rally / Getty Images / Photo: Scott Olson

If this past weekend’s Cubs Convention is any gauge, the appetite to relive last year’s World Series glory knows no ivy-strewn borders. Right on time with the promise of supplemental content is the man behind the sports most iconic documentary series, Baseball director Ken Burns. The filmmaker told Variety on Sunday that his is “sort of obligated” to add another episode of Baseball, centered on the Cubs’ kind-of-a-big-deal World Series win.

Variety notes that Burns had said last year he’d do another episode if the currently White House-bound North Siders prevailed. Columnist and fellow baseball mythologizer George Will emailed Burns after the Cubs took Game Seven, writing “Now you have to and do ‘The Eleventh Inning.'”

Burns’ original documentary series premiered in 1994 as nine hour-long episodes, or “innings.” The tenth-inning addendum first aired in 2010, covering the steroids scandal, the game’s growing internationalism and the ubiquitous broken curse of its day, the Red Sox’s 2004 World Series championship.

The modern-day makes a sometimes odd contrast to the Burns model of slow zooms on sepia stills, but the outsize romance of the Cubs’ historic win will fit in perfectly, pockets of mayhem be damned.