While some 9/11 documentaries focus on the tragic day, some are taking an expansive view reflecting on the past 20 years

The New York Times

"For 20 years, the refrain has been: Remember, remember, remember. Memory is so ingrained in the language of Sept. 11 — 'Never forget' — as to imply that it is obligatory, and sufficient, for future generations merely to remember by revisiting the narrative and imagery of one terrible day, rather than to connect it to the years of history that followed," says James Poniewozik. "But is Sept. 11 simply a day, or is it an era? Was it the beginning of something or a continuation? You can divide most of the anniversary specials between those that focus closely on the day that the towers fell and those that pull back, way back, to look at what emerged from the dust. There are plenty of the former kind. On National Geographic, the six-part series 9/11: One Day in America reassembles in granular detail the horrific experience of that morning. (It’s streaming on Hulu — all the programs mentioned here are currently streaming unless otherwise noted.) A special episode of 60 Minutes, premiering Sept. 12, revisits the stories of firefighters who survived the catastrophe, and those who didn’t...Focusing on the emotion and heroism of one day, of course, avoids getting ensnared in everything that came after. It sticks to what we can all agree on. It’s safer, in the way that it’s safer to teach the Civil War or Jim Crow as horrors of the past instead of events on a continuum that reaches into the present. The other approach is to decide that 20 years, a full generation, is long enough to treat the terror attacks as part of a larger historical era. Sept. 11 is not only in the past, as you can see in the bloody news from Afghanistan. For viewers who want to unpack how the attacks led to two decades of military entanglements, there’s Netflix’s five-part Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, which looks unsparingly at the intelligence failures before Sept. 11 and the mission creep through multiple administrations. Enlighteningly, it includes the voices of Afghan leaders and civilians. Sept. 11, as an epoch, meant upheaval for more than one nation. But the history of Sept. 11 goes far beyond war and foreign policy. It affected domestic politics, domestic enmities and even American culture." ALSO: Here's a full list of the 9/11 20th-anniversary documentaries.