NBC's Continued Race for the Bottom

NBC is doing a mini-series on 9/11. The goal of the mini-series? Based on this excerpt from a NYT story: to humanize the monsters who attacked us. Link.

Brian Grazer, co-chairman of Imagine Television, which is producing the NBC mini-series - and which has hired The Times as a consultant - said he hoped it would do for Muslims what Wolfgang Petersen's film "Das Boot" did for World War II-era Germans.

"Every approach prior to that was, the Germans were horrible," he said. "He humanized them, because they are human. That's what I'm hoping we do, that we don't demonize, that we humanize all the different sides, and so we see the seeds, and we get an understanding from each culture's point of view as to how they got to such a horrible place."

Incredible. If you want to humanize Muslims, that's a laudable goal (though not necessary, based on our society's attitude toward them). But to do it through the prism of 9/11? That's perverse.