Originally called 'The Long and Winding Road' (the name was changed when Mr. The 'Anthology' has actually been in the works since late 1969, just before the Beatles split up, making it probably the most slowly gestating production in television history. The rights to the first broadcasts of these recordings pushed the cost of the show for ABC up to a reported $20 million. But undoubtedly among the show's biggest lures are the broadcast premieres of 'Free as a Bird' and 'Real Love,' two unfinished Lennon recordings to which the surviving Beatles have added their voices and instruments to create what they apparently feel entirely comfortable describing as new Beatles tracks. Included, too, are dozens of performance clips, most of them not broadcast in 30 years or more, and quite a few never shown in the United States. In 'The Beatles Anthology,' a six-hour documentary on ABC Sunday, Wednesday and Thanksgiving Day at 9 P.M., Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr offer what they consider the definitive telling of the Beatles' story, with ample commentary from Lennon, who covered the subject thoroughly in radio and television interviews during his lifetime. Now, a quarter-century after their breakup and 15 years after John Lennon was murdered, the Beatles are returning to television.

When they visited the United States for the first time, four months later, they skipped the theater circuit and went directly onto 'The Ed Sullivan Show,' beaming their well-tested charm directly to some 73 million viewers. 1 records and had been playing nonstop tours of small British theaters for years, but it wasn't until they appeared on a popular variety show, 'Val Parnell's Sunday Night at the London Palladium,' that October that the national press began to write about Beatlemania. THE Beatles learned early that the quickest way to get the world's attention was to go on television.

The beatles anthology netflix