There are narrow parameters to this Ethan Hawke-narrated documentary – the conflict’s effects on the US. But it’s a valuable reflection packed with emotional, moving tales from penitent soldiers whose lives were torn apart

For the US and its allies, postwar foreign policy conforms to a pattern. In the planning and execution stages, this new war is strategically essential and a moral imperative, and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor; decades on, when it’s too late, it’s admitted that the same war was a folly or perhaps even a crime. Usually, though, the war was bad because of what it did to the US, not what it did to the other nations involved.

The six-part documentary series Vietnam: The War That Changed America sticks to that brief. There are a handful of Vietnamese interviewees, and the extent of the carnage wrought upon the country’s people is touched upon, but the subject matter is the effect the war had on the psyches of US soldiers – and on the mindset of the US itself. This does not, however, make the enterprise worthless. Accept those narrow parameters and the stories it tells are powerful, often stunningly, movingly so. Maybe it’s indictment enough.

Vietnam: The War That Changed America is on Apple TV+.

A new Netflix series focuses on the trial that gripped and changed America, a key aim being to educate those young enough not to remember the grim details

For those who lived through the trial of the century and are still grappling with its ramifications 30 years on, OJ Simpson’s death from prostate cancer last April was a marked anticlimax – one last deception from the ultimate fake out artist, maybe. Given his grave prognosis, the hope was that he would be moved to reflect on his past mistakes, or that he would be overcome with the kind of long-festering feelings of guilt that might culminate in a shock death bed confession.

Instead, the Juice remained defiant to the end, convinced he would beat the cancer wrap too, and carried on tweeting about sports and politics until time ran out on him at age 76. “If you remember he said he was fine,” recalls director Floyd Russ. “So I always joke that he lied to us until the day he died, basically.”