Short answers, pulled from the story.
More than 39 million viewers tuned in to at least one episode of The Civil War. Viewership averaged more than 14 million per evening, making it the most-watched program ever to air on PBS.
The theme song is "Ashokan Farewell," composed by Jay Ungar in 1982. It plays twenty-five times across the series and is the only modern piece of music in the film. It became the first single release for the Elektra Nonesuch label.
The series aired on PBS for five consecutive nights from September 23 to 27, 1990. It was rebroadcast in June 1994 and again in restored high-definition form from September 7 to 11, 2015.
The series received more than forty major film and television awards, including two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, a D.W. Griffith Award, and the US$50,000 Lincoln Prize, among others.
Historians have criticized the series for focusing heavily on battles while giving limited coverage to the causes of the war, women, Black Americans, and the Reconstruction era. Critics also argue the series gave disproportionate screen time to Shelby Foote, a novelist rather than a trained historian, whose framing of the war as a "failure to compromise" conflicts with the academic consensus that the war was fought to preserve slavery. Some critics say the series propagated Lost Cause ideology.
The Ken Burns effect is a filmmaking technique of slowly zooming and panning across still photographs. It takes its name from Ken Burns's use of the technique throughout The Civil War documentary, which popularized it widely enough that the method became named after him.