Before it aired in the United States, more than 200 high schools and universities nationwide paid for the license to record and show the documentary in the classroom as a television course on the Vietnam War. In conjunction with this educational effort, the Asian Society's periodical, Focus on Asian Studies, published a special issue titled "Vietnam: A Teacher's Guide" to aid teachers in the use of this documentary in the classroom.

     The roots of the documentary reach back to 1977, when filmmaker Richard Ellison and foreign correspondent Stanley Kamow first discussed the project. Kamow had been a journalist in Paris during the 1950s and a correspondent in French Indochina since 1959. Kamow and Ellison then signed on Lawrence Lichty, then professor at the University of Wisconsin, as director of media research to help gather, organize, and edit media material ranging from audio- and videotapes and film coverage to still photographs and testimonials. As a result, Vietnam: A Television History became a "compilation" documentary, relying heavily on a combination of fixed moments (photographs, written text) as well as fluid moments (moving video and film).

     The final cost of  the  project  totaled approximately $4.5  million. At the time of  its broadcast  in  1983,  it was one of the most expensive ventures ever undertaken by public television. While the initial funding came from WGBH-TV Boston and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting refused financial support. Ellison and Kamow sought additional backing abroad, gaining support from Britain's Associated Television (later to become Central Independent Television). Coproduc­tion with French Television (Antenne-2) enabled the documentarians to gain access to important archives from the French occupation of the region. Antenne-2 produced the earliest episodes of the documentary, and Associated Television partially produced the fifth episode.

     Kamow and Ellison saw the documentary as an opportunity to present both sides of the Vietnam War story, the U.S. perspective and the Vietnamese perspective. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, documentaries and films on the Vietnam War tended to look solely at U.S. involvement and its consequences both at home and in the war-torn region. Kamow and Elli­son sought to produce a more comprehensive historical account that traced the history of foreign invasion and subsequent Vietnamese cultural development over several hundred years. Both producers believed that by providing a more comprehensive view of Vietnam, the documentary could become a vehicle for reconciliation as well as reflection.

     The series aired first in Great Britain to good reviews, although it did not receive the high ratings it achieved in the United States . At the time of its broadcast in the United States in the fall of 1983, the documentary received very positive reviews from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Variety. Furthermore, both Time and Newsweek  hailed  the  series  as fair, brilliant, and objective.

     However, other critics of the documentary  were less complementary and viewed it as overly generous to the North Vietnamese. The organization Accuracy in Media (AIM) produced and aired a response to the documentary seeking to "correct" the inaccurate depiction of Vietnam in the series. PBS's decision to air the two-hour show, titled Television's Vietnam: The Real Story, was seen by many liberal critics as bowing to overt political pressure. In fact,  PBS's concession to air AIM's response to the documentary (its own production) was rare, perhaps unprecedented, in television history.

     The controversy surrounding Vietnam: A Television History and the response to it, Television's Vietnam: The Real Story, raise the important question of bias in documentary production . Bias in the interpretation of historical events has fueled, and continues to fuel, rigorous debates among historians, politicians, and citizens. The experience Kamow and Ellison had in creating this documentary underscores the sense that the more "producers" involved in a project, the more difficult the task of controlling for bias becomes. The episodes prepared by the British and French teams were noticeably more anti-American in tone.

     Despite the controversy, Vietnam: A Television History remains one of the most popular history documentaries used in educational forums. It inspired Stanley Kamow's best-selling book Vietnam: A History, which was billed as a "companion" to the PBS series. Both in the United States and around the world, the book remains a popular history text for college courses concerning the war and the controversy surrounding that conflict.