Connections

The question is in what way are the triggers around us likely to operate to cause things to change -- for better or worse. And, is there anything we can learn from the way that happened before, so we can teach ourselves to look for and recognize the signs of change? The trouble is, that's not easy when you have been taught as I was, for example, that things in the past happened in straight-forward lines

—Episode 10 - Yesterday, Tomorrow and You

Well-regarded 1978 documentary series by British Science Historian James Burke. Subtitled "An Alternative View of Change", Connections presented what would come to be known as the web theory of history, rejecting the straight-line notion of technological progress, instead presenting major aspects of the modern world as the end product of long strings of happy accidents where the historical context causes two otherwise unrelated tracks happen into each other (For example, he attributes rocketry to the coincident of a meat shortage in England with malaria in the Florida swamps). The series traced paths leading to radar, the atom bomb, the computer, television, plastic, the production line, and similar installments in the modern world.

Some element of the motivation behind Connections appears to be to point out the dangers of shutting down any particular line of scientific or technological progress as not worthwhile (A subject that would have hit close-to-home for Burke, as he was at the time best known in the UK for his coverage of the Apollo landings), since the ultimate benefits of any advance could be enormous and utterly unpredictable -- almost all of his paths through the knowledge web involve several innovations which were at the time considered failures or worthless.

Though not strictly a sequel, the 1985 series The Day The Universe Changed, subtitled "A Personal View", used the same style and techniques, this time tracing paths not to specific inventions, but to aspects of modern society: modern medicine, credit, having a specific field of expertise rather than being a generic TV Genius, the notion of "progress" and the like.

In the 1990s, The Learning Channel produced two sequel series, Connections 2 and Connections 3. The sequels were paced much faster and did not go into the depth of the earlier offerings.

Another reason for the popularity of Burke's documentaries is that he is also a skilled showman with an excellent sense of humor, which enables his films to grant as much laughs as enlightenment. In other words, instead of his history of science documentaries being stuffy, they're fun!

Some of the ground covered in the earlier series would be covered by Burke again in the 1990 Maryland Public Television-produced After The Warming, a Mockumentary tracing the historical threads leading to global climate change and suggesting a path forward from the point of view of a 2050 society which has (just barely) gotten global warming under control.

Connections is also perhaps the only documentary series to have spawned a licensed tie-in video game, Connections: It's a Mind Game is a Myst-style Adventure Game based loosely on Connections 2.

Tropes used in Connections include:

Alternate History: Several times during the two later series Burke muses about how easily we could not have had, say, penicillin due to the unpredictable nature history connects.
And Man Grew Proud: Burke is fond of warning against this. The fact that most of his shows were made during the Cold War is a fairly obvious contributing factor.
For Want of a Nail: Pretty much the entire point of the series.
Hollywood History: Not merely one of the greatest aversions of it ever made, but also (especially in the last episode of the first series) treats almost all history as Hollywood History, due to historians who Did Not Do the Research.
What Happened to the Mouse?: Spectacularly averted -- Burke always manages to tie everything together at the end of each episode.
Wiki Walk: the structure of most episodes, albeit a little more linear.