American Experience Season 1

American Experience Season 1 is currently streaming on and , and it treats its subject with more rigour than the format usually demands. The show says what it needs to say in a single season, no filler. With 48 viewer ratings on TMDB, this is not a title flying under the radar. The storytelling serves the subject rather than the other way around. Put it on tonight and see for yourself.

There is a reason American Experience Season 1 keeps coming up in conversation. American Experience Season 1 resists the urge to oversimplify a subject that deserves better. Season 1 of American Experience includes 16 episodes. It aired from October 1988 to January 1989. Episodes include "The Great San Francisco Earthquake", "Radio Bikini", "Indians, Outlaws and Angie Debo". It was aired in 1988. Documentary work at this level requires access that is hard to get and storytelling that does justice to it — American Experience Season 1 has both. It knows exactly what it is, and does not try to be anything else.

Anyone after documentary work that genuinely informs rather than confirms will value American Experience Season 1. It stands on its own even without an obvious comparison point. The complete run is available and best experienced without too much prior knowledge of where it goes. The access the production gets is remarkable, and the storytelling does full justice to it. Worth watching in order, from the beginning.

📡 Where to Watch American Experience Season 1

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PBS

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

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🇨🇦 Canada

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🇳🇿 New Zealand

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🎬 American Experience Season 1 — Episode Guide

The Great San Francisco Earthquake

1988-10-04

From Enrico Caruso to the ordinary San Franciscan, this film presents vivid memories of those trapped in the terrifying event of 1906. Four hundred eighty square blocks were reduced to rubble; thousands were killed, tens of thousands left homeless. Then the heroic struggle to rebuild a city from the...

Radio Bikini

1988-10-11

While the U.N. debated strategies for control of atomic energy, the U.S. Navy was preparing two highly-publicized nuclear tests. Seven hundred fifty cameras were shipped to Bikini to be used for a major propaganda film. Bikinians had no say about turning their idyllic island into an atomic test site...

Indians, Outlaws and Angie Debo

1988-10-18

As a child in 1899, Angie Debo was taken to Oklahoma in a covered wagon. She would become her state's most controversial historian -- her career threatened when she uncovered a cache of documents which proved a widespread conspiracy to cheat Native Americans out of oil-rich lands.

Eric Sevareid's Not So Wild A Dream

1988-10-25

A touching memoir beginning with life in a small Minnesota town and taking us through a young man's early days as pacifist. Reporting on the rise of fascism in Europe, Sevareid, as a young CBS reporter, would change his belief. Based on Sevareid's best-selling book of the same title.

The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter

1988-11-01

An original look through newsreels, war department films, posters and interviews with five, real-life "Rosies" about the reality of working in the defense plants during WWII, and their reactions to having to give up those jobs for returning GIs.

Do You Mean There Are Still Real Cowboys?

1988-11-08

A year in the life of Wyoming cowboys and the ranching families who have lived in Big Piney for six generations. Although very much the same as it was one hundred years ago -- tough, lonely, but still romantic -- ranching is now a threatened way of life.

Kennedy vs. Wallace: A Crisis Up Close

1988-11-15

An intimate portrait of the Kennedy brothers and their confrontation with Alabama Governor George Wallace when he defied the courts by refusing to integrate the University in 1963. The film offers unprecedented access to the Oval Office as well as to strategy meetings held by Attorney General Robert...

Geronimo and the Apache Resistance

1988-11-22

The story of a tragic collision of two civilizations, each with startlingly different views of one another. In 1886, 5,000 U.S. troops mobilized to capture this one man and his band of followers, who by refusing to move onto a reservation, defied and eluded federal authorities.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Revisited

1988-11-29

An updated look at the Alabama tenant families that Walker Evans and James Agee documented in their 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, an American classic.

E10

That Rhythm, Those Blues

1988-12-06

The evolution of rhythm and blues through the careers of singers Ruth Brown and Charles Brown, from the 1940s into the 50s, with contemporary performances by both.

E11

The Radio Priest

1988-12-13

Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest from Michigan, uses the new power of radio to become one of the first media stars; every Sunday he would broadcast his message railing against the nation's economic and social system to millions of listeners caught in the grip of the Depression.

E12

Hearts and Hands

1988-12-20

The design and art of quilting yields intimate clues about the lives of 19th century women, who stitched their personal and political stories into these artifacts of history.

E13

Views of a Vanishing Frontier

1988-12-27

The journey of Prince Maximilian, German naturalist, and artist Karl Bodmer, who explored the Mississippi River area from 1832-34, meticulously documenting in paintings and journals the landscape, plants and life of Native Americans.

E14

Eudora Welty: One Writer's Beginnings

1989-01-03

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Eudora Welty narrates the story of her own Southern childhood and early artistic development in Jackson, Mississippi. Based on her best-selling book of the same title.

E15

The World That Moses Built

1989-01-10

From the late 1920s through the 1960s, Robert Moses held almost total power over the landscape of New York. He built bridges, highways, Jones Beach, Lincoln Center and the United Nations, some of the most ambitious public works ever conceived, and some of the most controversial.

E16

Sins of Our Mothers

1989-01-17

A Gothic tale of sin and redemption in 19th century New England. A small town in Maine reacts to the unconventional behavior of one of its young residents, a woman named Emeline Gurney. A fascinating examination of small town mores.

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