Documentaries used to be about scientific exploration and documentation. But increasingly, they're trading in schlock TV techniques like jump-cuts, digital effects, thumping rock music and hyping up even the most trivial elements of the story in attempts to create some tension. These are some of the things that bring "Ben Franklin's Pirate Fleet" down. Repeatedly, the narrator breathlessly says things like "...but time is running out!" and "This may be the last chance the crew will have to find anything at the wreck site!" NEVER do they explain *why* time is supposedly in short supply! Is the ocean being closed for repairs at the end of the week? Does the crew have to return to their real jobs? My sense is that it there weren't any real time constraints, but the filmmakers wanted to add some tension to get the audience's pulses racing. But *why*? We want to learn about history, not get manipulated by dramatizations of what *might* have happened.
It's also clear that the divers are anything but trained archaeologists; they use an air chisel ("...like a jackhammer", claims the narrator, but actually, just like a pneumatic hand-drill) to chop artifact out of the seabed. There's no evidence that they were documenting the locations or contexts of artifacts; certainly not with grid boxes, photo surveys and the other things one expect of marine archaeological digs. It's all about "dive in and grab stuff!" But what exactly is it they found? Clearly, they've found a few pieces of 18th/19th century boats, but that in no way proves that those boats happened to have been privateers, much less privateers working for the Revolutionary cause, at the behest of Franklin. Much is made of the "fact" that the crew doesn't find any markings on the metal pieces they found -- as if every metal piece on a British boat or ship was stamped with "Made in Britain"! Again and again, viewers are reminded of how far away this show is from being scientific. And instead of showing us something definitive at the end, it peters out with nothing resolved or even learned. What a far cry from National Geographic's former standards!