The HISTORY Channel is spending President’s Day Weekend with Abraham Lincoln through a three-night documentary event at 8/7c Sunday-Tuesday, February 20th-22nd. “We like to bring to bear all of the storytelling tools that we possibly can for a series like this, and that includes what we call ‘cinema docs’ because we believe that it's the beautiful marriage of cinema and documentary,” executive producer Dave Sirulnick explained during a TCA press conference. Unlike a traditional documentary, the event includes scripted sequences with actors to bring the story to life. “The combination of all those tools, if you will, to tell this epic story and this very personal story is what we like to bring to these and we think that it is a really wonderful new format.”
(Joe Alblas/The HISTORY Channel)
“I was terrified that I would be in the wake of Daniel Day-Lewis,” Emmy-nominated actor Graham Sibley shared about portraying the 16th president of the United States. “Spending this much focused time with Abraham Lincoln, it redefines what you think strength is and moving forward, this experience just asks so much of me, and anyone, I think, who spends time with him recognizes the immense struggles that he was under. It demands self-discipline and integrity and honesty, and it just goes on and on and on of these major hurdles that he had to overcome. I’m just dangling onto a thread of it trying to put some veil of reality to it, but to imagine what he must have gone through is a lonely, isolating experience, but just a thread of what I’m sure he was going through.”
Abraham Lincoln is executive produced by presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning bestselling author Doris Kearns Goodwin. “After having written about Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedys, there’s nothing bigger, in a certain sense, than the Moby Dick of American history, which is Abraham Lincoln,” Doris shared. “It was really scary for me, too. I hadn’t studied the 19th century, and the incredible thing I found was that the Lincoln scholars were so hopeful. I was able to stand on their shoulders. David Donald, who was one of the great Lincoln scholars, introduced me to his library. He introduced me to fellow historians, and there’s a certain sense in which Lincoln’s desire not to have resentments toward other people or feel jealous of other people or feel envy plays off on all of us who studied him. I think I became a better person by knowing my fellow Lincoln historians.”
Over the course of the seven-and-a-half-hour miniseries, viewers will see a detailed portrait of Lincoln, including the things that made him inherently human, his contradictions. “What the series is going to be able to do is to take Lincoln when he was simply Abe,” Doris Kearns Goodwin explained. “Graham plays him starting at 21 years old, which is incredible and he'll play him all the way to 56. And you see a man who's contradictory about whether he's gonna go for emancipation or whether he just is gonna go for union… He's got all sorts of depression that he's suffering with his entire life, but humor is the way that he gets his resilience back. He loses that first race for the senate — two races for the senate, a first race for the state legislature — but he keeps going, and he finally wins.”
Celebrate President’s Day Weekend with Abraham Lincoln on The History Channel on Sunday, February 20th, Monday, February 21st, and Tuesday, February 22nd at 8/7c.