Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Muhammad Ali’ On PBS, A Ken Burns Co-Directed Docuseries About The Legend’s Life And Influcences

When a subject, whether it’s an individual person or an overarching concept like jazz, gets the “Ken Burns treatment,” you’re expecting slow music, lots of panning over old photos, and interviews with all sorts of experts. But Burns’ latest effort, Muhammad Ali, is as fast as the young Ali was in the ring, but with lots of space to examine just what made Ali truly The Greatest, and who had the biggest influence on that. Read on for more…

MUHAMMAD ALI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An archival video of Muhammad Ali with one of his daughters, jokingly distracting her so he can grab a bite of her breakfast.

The Gist: Muhammad Ali is a four-part, eight-hour docuseries that examines the life of one of the 20th century’s most famous athletes, including the people that influenced him along the way during his 72 years. Written and directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, the docuseries is split into four “rounds”, each covering the significant phases of The Greatest’s very eventful life.

“Round One: The Greatest” covers the time period from his birth in 1942 to when he first won the heavyweight championship in 1964. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. in Louisville, Kentucky, we hear from historians and Ali scholars about his childhood, growing up with a younger brother he was close to, in a house he described as peaceful. Accounts of how Cassius Sr., a sign painter and early civil rights activist, used to get drunk and get violent with Cassius Jr.’s mother Odessa. But there are also accounts of how Cassius Sr. had a large personality that people gravitated towards.

When Cassius Jr. stepped foot in a boxing gym for the first time, entering the basement gym after someone stole his bike, he was a skinny 12 year-old that had mediocre skills. But he could move, and his reflexes were unnaturally quick. As he rose up the amateur ranks, eventually winning the Golden Gloves and, in 1960, an Olympic gold medal, his instincts were honed. The fact that he was able to lean back to avoid punches, but didn’t get hit when he left himself so open, was one of the big skills that his early trainers encouraged, even though it wasn’t proper technique.

Clay turned pro soon after the Olympics, and settled on working under Angelo Dundee in Miami Beach. After his early fights, when he saw the wrestler Gorgeous George attract a crowd with his outspokenness, Clay thought he could use his gift of gab to his advantage. Before every fight, he predicted how many rounds it would take for him to win, and those predictions came true for the first few years, as he fought one tomato can after another.

He was getting national attention, and there were calls for him to go up against Floyd Patterson, then Sonny Liston when he beat Patterson, for the heavyweight championship. But Clay was also becoming attracted to the teachings of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, and later, became friends with Malcolm X. It fed into his personality, and the image he was projecting to the media and the boxing world of a Black man who will say and do what he wants. At the same time, the rift between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad made Clay take sides. In the meantime, his mostly white businessmen backers started getting uncomfortable.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Muhammad Ali brings to mind Antoine Fuqua’s 2019 four-hour docuseries What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali. But with twice as much running time, the Burns/Burns/McMahon documentary has time to explore not just Ali’s career, but go in depth about the people that had the greatest influence on his life.

Our Take: The aforementioned eight-hour runtime is what has us the most intrigued by Muhammad Ali. This isn’t the first time that Ken Burns, along with his daughter Sarah and David McMahon, have taken on a sports figure’s eventful life; they collaborated on the Jackie Robinson docuseries. But while Jackie is a hero for breaking barriers, Ali was one of the most famous people of the 20th century. People knew about him, his career and his life who didn’t know or care much about boxing. So what can the Burnses and McMahon say about Ali that we didn’t already know, or was covered in one of the myriad documentaries about him?

The first “round” helps answer that question by giving a lot of time to the big influencers of Ali’s life. First his father, then Angelo Dundee, then Elijah Muhammad, then Malcolm X, then Sonny Liston. We suspect that in subsequent “rounds” we’ll get to hear a lot about figures like Howard Cosell, Dick Cavett, Joe Frazier, and so on. While these mini-profiles of Ali’s most influential figures feel like they may distract from the narrative, they actually take what is a well-worn story at this point and frames it from new perspectives.

The breakdown of each episode coincides with the major phases of Ali’s life: Birth to capturing the heavyweight crown; then his Sixties reign as champion, when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali and fought for civil rights his own way, leading to losing his crown over not entering the draft for Vietnam.

The third episode examines his Seventies comeback after he was reinstated, where he had the massive fights with Frazier, including the “Thrilla In Manila”, but there were already signs that he was taking to much abuse. The last episode takes a look at the end of Ali’s career, where he captured the crown for a third time, but pushed to fight after that, despite signs that it was affecting his health; his post-career life, as Parkinson’s syndrome took hold, will also be examined.

We were a little disappointed with the trio’s choice of experts to talk about Ali; while there were a number of Black contemporaries who spoke in the first episode, there were also people like David Remnick of The New Yorker and Ali biographer Jonathan Eig. For the nuts and bolts of Ali’s life, those perspectives were fine. But for what it was like for him being the most famous person in the world during the height of the civil rights movement, more Black voices need to be heard from.

That being said, we’re eager to see the rest of Muhammad Ali, despite the fact that the story is a familiar one. We’re confident that the Burnses and McMahon will find pieces of Ali’s story that have been less publicized — we’ll likely get more on his association with the Nation of Islam and his life as a Muslim, and there will hopefully be more about his life with his four wives and seven kids. But we’re also eager to see the parts of Ali’s story we already know about, given how well-paced the first two hours went.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As we see footage of a more subdued Cassius Clay, the day after beating Liston, saying “I’m free to be what I want and think what I want.” Eig says, “Boom, Muhammad Ali is born.”

Sleeper Star: It’s Ali all the way. He had such a magnetic personality that, even five years after his death, his legend is pretty vibrant.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Even though Muhammad Ali is getting the “Ken Burns treatment,” the docuseries Muhammad Ali is reverent but unafraid of digging into what made Ali tick and the people who influenced the most.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Muhammad Ali On PBS.org