• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

PBS takes up three hours of prime time this week for a Ken Burns-produced documentary about Henry David Thoreau that is a lovely film to behold.

It is beautifully shot, written, edited, researched and voiced -- much like many of the other documentaries in which Burns has been involved for decades.

While previewing the first hour on Friday, I was struck by how much of a rarity this production is. 

The film, titled simply “Henry David Thoreau -- is slow and meandering. It lingers on images of forests and sun-dappled rivers and ponds. Its lineup of historian-commentators speak in hushed voices.

Throughout the film, the 19th-century prose of Thoreau and his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson is recited softly and lovingly by top actors -- especially Jeff Goldblum voicing the Thoreau works and Ted Danson taking up the Emerson passages. 

Having said all that, one wonders how many people will actually stick with a three-hour documentary such as this one that takes its sweet time to unfold its story?

Of course, streaming options make this question less relevant than it used to be. 

“Henry David Thoreau” will be available starting Monday on the PBS streaming service PBS Passport. 

That means that whomever is interested in watching all three hours can take their own sweet time doing it.

Narrated by George Clooney, “Henry David Thoreau” is directed by brothers Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers.

Their company, Ewers Brothers Productions, is positioned as the lead producer of the film, in partnership with Burns’ Florentine Films production company.

Besides Burns, the other executive producer of “Henry David Thoreau,” is Don Henley, founder and singer for the Eagles.

He has been involved in Thoreau preservation for decades. In 1990, he founded The Walden Woods Project to campaign for preserving the natural landscape around Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

Thoreau immortalized the pond in his famed book “Walden; or Life in the Woods,” published in 1854.

The documentary brings the world of pre-Civil War Concord, Massachusetts, vividly to life -- its environs, its intellectual pursuits, its activism -- and most of all, Thoreau himself.

As it should do, the documentary humanizes him. He was not some sort of Moses wandering the land in sandals.

Instead, he was a hard-working, prolific writer who became very successful at it. The film points out that Thoreau never set out to be well-known, but with talent like his, how he could he not be?

The three-part “Henry David Thoreau” airs Monday night, March 30, with two episodes, followed by one episode on Tuesday, March 31 -- starting at 9 p.m. Eastern on both nights on PBS.