The effect of the federal assault on public broadcasting in the United States has mostly been expressed in big numbers and dire forecasts: $1.1 billion taken back; the existence of more than 100 television and radio stations at risk.
But the cutbacks have already had one smaller, more immediate effect. WGBH, the bellwether public TV station in Boston, has laid off the 13 people who worked on the history series “American Experience” and announced that no new documentaries will be produced for the show until further notice.
Work on six films that had been commissioned and were in production for 2026 was halted in May, said Cameo George, the series’s executive producer. The filmmakers were told that their projects were being terminated on July 21, the same day the “American Experience” staff was laid off. The documentary’s topics included the national highway system, the G.I. Bill, birthright citizenship and Puerto Rico’s history as a U.S. territory.
The loss of new installments of “American Experience” will not cause the outcry that a sudden interruption in the “Real Housewives” franchise would inspire. But as an ongoing, serious examination of American history on TV, the show is unrivaled. The documentarian Stanley Nelson, who has produced seven films for “American Experience,” said in an online statement in response to the hiatus, “There is quite literally no replacement for this series.”
“At a time when history is trying to be erased by so many different sides, history has just become more and more important,” Nelson said in an interview this week. “It’s not told anywhere with the accuracy, with the time, that ‘American Experience’ gives to the filmmakers to try to reinterpret history and get history right. That disappearing, even if it’s for a short time, at this time is a shame.”
Along with WNET in New York and WETA in Washington, WGBH is the powerhouse of PBS content production, home to “Antiques Roadshow,” “Frontline,” “Masterpiece” and “Nova” along with “American Experience.” Susan Goldberg, the chairman and chief executive of WGBH, said that the decision to take action on “American Experience” immediately was driven by the show’s cost. On a per-hour basis, she said, it was the most expensive show funded by PBS.
George identified several reasons for the high cost of making an original history series. “We have to pay universities, the broadcast networks, libraries, collectors for access to archival material,” she said. “So that is truly very expensive.” She added that because “American Experience” is an original series, making films “from the ground up” — unlike PBS documentary showcases such as “POV” or “Independent Lens,” which acquire already completed films — it also bears all the costs of promotion, outreach and creating complementary digital programming.
“American Experience” has produced close to 400 documentaries across 37 seasons, earning more than 40 prime-time Emmy nominations and 12 wins. (Nelson’s “Freedom Riders” won three of those awards, and he took another for directing “The Murder of Emmett Till.”)
The vibrancy of the storytelling, and the urgency of the subjects, varies from film to film. (The Season 34 opener, “Riveted: The History of Jeans” in 2022, was one of the series’s periodic bids for crossover appeal. The images of dungaree-clad bodies through the years were predictably entertaining.) But WGBH’s involvement ensures a degree of quality control, and the show’s execution of the dignified archival style — one it developed alongside Ken Burns, whose “The Civil War” premiered two years after “American Experience” debuted in 1988 — is reliable. The sameness of the approach to wildly different topics can be knocked as homogeneity or welcomed as consistency.
The series has also been dependable in choosing subjects that speak to current concerns. That can be seen in the new documentaries that remain on the “American Experience” schedule this fall. (Recent films are available at the “American Experience” website after broadcast, and there is a selection on the show’s YouTube page.)
“Clearing the Air: The War on Smog,” which premiered Tuesday, tells the story of how the appearance of deadly smog in the 1940s led, slowly and fitfully, to the introduction of the catalytic converter, the prevalence of unleaded gas and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. It uses nostalgic images of 1950s and ’60s Southern California suburbia to help us digest the science, politics and bureaucracy.
Recalling a time when pollution felt imminently apocalyptic, the film implicitly calls to mind climate change, the present man-made environmental crisis. The parallels keep coming at you: groundbreaking scientific research is attacked and belittled by big business; California, more through coincidence and stubbornness than conviction, carries on the fight that leads to national change. The film lets the history speak for itself: The support of the Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard M. Nixon for key legislation shows that “environmental questions weren’t partisan,” past tense.
The relevance to our fractured polity is even more pointed in “Hard Hat Riot,” premiering on Sept. 30. Its focus is a little-remembered outbreak of fierce violence four days after the Kent State killings in May 1970, when hundreds of construction workers organized themselves to run roughshod over antiwar protesters in downtown Manhattan.
“Hard Hat Riot” is more upfront about its connections to our own time, which are unavoidable. The working-class backlash against the war protests prefigures both the reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests decades later and President Donald Trump’s current attacks on universities. (Footage of New York City police rousting students at Columbia is eerily reminiscent of the department’s response to last year’s protests at Columbia University.) The film provides an X-ray of a metastatic national divide that is more about style, language, class and religion than any discernible ideology.
The season ends on Oct. 27 and 28 with “Kissinger,” a two-part biography of Henry Kissinger from Barak Goodman, who has made a dozen previous documentaries for “American Experience” and won a directing Emmy for one of them, “My Lai.” For now, “Kissinger” is the last new film the series will present.
Goldberg is adamant that the series will return to original production. She said that it will present films from its catalog in 2026 — the 250th anniversary of American independence will provide plenty of hooks — while the station “takes a beat” to consider the series’s future.
“ ‘American Experience’ is not going to go away,” she said. “We are invested in telling history stories and determined to continue it forward.” Raney Aronson-Rath, the executive producer of the investigative series “Frontline,” has been asked to oversee “American Experience” and the science series “Nova” as well, Goldberg said, “to really look at how do we make sure, on digital platforms, we’re fulfilling the storytelling potential that we have” in documentary programming.
Discussions of the federal clawback have focused on the consequences for small stations. But the interdependent nature of the public system, in which member stations pay dues to PBS that the network then uses to buy programming made by the large stations, means that what affects one station affects all. “It’s sort of like pulling on a ball of yarn,” Goldberg said. “It’s all interconnected.”
And a pause, or worse, in a series like “American Experience” affects not just PBS, WGBH and their viewers, but the hundreds of documentary filmmakers who lose one of the few reliable outposts for serious work.
“It wasn’t so much market driven,” Nelson said of the luxury of making films for “American Experience.” “It didn’t have to be true crime or romance or celebrity profile. It was history for the sake of telling history, and the idea that American history in and of itself is something that can be entertaining.”
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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