In recent years, historical docuseries have catered to nostalgia for major news stories of the past. Maybe nostalgia isn’t the right word for all of these anniversary-focused looks back at disasters, tragedies, and criminal cases, even if some of them now seem relatively quaint next to what feels to be much more regular occurrences of violence, weather-related catastrophes, and socio-political turmoil in the present. But there’s an appeal to these documentaries outside of plain historicism, or they wouldn’t be made in such quantities. Many events even garner competing series from different streaming platforms, and most are produced too well to merely be commemorative.
The unimaginatively titled Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time is the first of two prestige series out this summer focused on the devastating 2005 tropical storm that temporarily wiped out New Orleans. While we’ve had some big hurricanes since then, Katrina remains the deadliest to hit the U.S. mainland in modern times, and it remains the costliest ever — though as Race Against Time (and other documentaries before it) reminds us, a lot of this natural disaster’s real tragedy was man-made. And not just in terms of the human causes of climate change. When we think of history as lessons from which we may avoid repeating past mistakes, it’s the narratives on the aftermath of Katrina that should have already been more of a warning about avoidable human error than the inconvenient truth that more big storms are coming.
Race Against Time, a five-part series directed by Oscar-nominee Traci Curry (Attica) and executive produced by Ryan and Zinzi Coogler, Simon and Jonathan Chinn, and Peter Nicks, knows that the Katrina story is more than just something memorably and mournfully cataclysmic that happened 20 years ago. The series opens with a survivor, the community organizer Malik Rahim, explaining that to prevent something from happening again, you need to know how it happened the first time. It’s the caution about history repeating itself in different wording. More striking are his words later in the series about how Katrina was a “wake-up call,” but “we fell back asleep.” If the point is not clear enough to viewers, Curry includes a montage of recent disasters whose destruction is more than nature’s fault, including this year’s wildfires in Los Angeles.
The documentary is not preachy, though, nor does it take a historian’s approach. Most of the talking heads are people who were there, whether in rescue and leadership roles or survivors now sharing their firsthand memories of the experience. It takes us through events and feelings chronologically, not in a way that necessarily gives us a sense of what it was like, but at least both broad and specific understandings. With the captivating survivor testimonials, Race Against Time reminded me of the similarly excellent Oklahoma City: One Day in America. Curry flawlessly combines these real people and accounts with archival footage and animated maps to perfectly illustrate what happened, why, and how traumatic it all was and continues to be.