From the minds of Fred Armisen, Bill Hader and Seth Meyers comes a new series Documentary Now! that looks back on 50 years of excellence and integrity in documentary filmmaking. See Fred and Bill investigate drug cartels, join an indifferent ‘70s rock band, reenact Iceland's annual Al Capone Festival, take part in a dramatic exposé of the world's first documentary about the Inuit and much more.

500 Nations is an eight part documentary which explores the history of the indigenous peoples of North and Central America and their fall to the European conquerors.  

American Experience is TV's most-watched history series and brings to life incredible characters and compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today. Acclaimed by viewers and critics alike, American Experience documentaries have been honored with every major broadcast award, including 30 Emmy Awards, 4 duPont-Columbia Awards, and 18 George Foster Peabody Awards.

Series showcasing the best of international documentary filmmakers works.

Since it began in 1983, Frontline has been airing public-affairs documentaries that explore a wide scope of the complex human experience. Frontline's goal is to extend the impact of the documentary beyond its initial broadcast by serving as a catalyst for change..

For four decades the fifth estate has been Canada's premier investigative documentary program. Hosts Bob McKeown, Gillian Findlay and Mark Kelley continue the tradition of provocative and fearless journalism which began with Adrienne Clarkson, Warner Troyer and Peter Reilly in 1975.Each week the fifth estate brings in-depth investigations that matter to Canadians – delivering a dazzling parade of political leaders, controversial characters and ordinary people whose lives were touched by triumph or tragedy.In 2014, the fifth estate won an International Emmy® Award for its investigation into the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, titled Made in Bangladesh. For the third year in a row, the fifth estate was named Canada's Best News Information Series at the Canadian Screen Awards.

60 Minutes has been on the air since 1968, beginning on a Tuesday, but spending most of its time on Sundays, where it remains today. This popular news magazine provides both hard hitting investigations, interviews and features, along with people in the news and current events. 60 Minutes has set unprecedented records in the Nielsen's ratings with a number 1 rating, five times, making it among the most successful TV programs in all of television history. This series has won more Emmy awards than any other news program and in 2003, Don Hewitt, the creator (back in 1968), was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Emmy, along with the 60 Minute correspondents. Added to the 11 Peabody awards, this phenomenally long-lived series has collected 78 awards up to the 2005 season and remains among the viewers top choice for news magazine features.

The Passionate Eye is Canada's longest-running national showcase for independent documentaries. For 23 years, it's provided Canadians with a critical window on the world, exploring international events and people through timely and provocative award-winning documentaries. Passionate Eye documentaries have won every major award including Emmy's, Oscars, Peabodys and Geminis, but they've also made news... films like Hunted in Russia, Holy Money, Invisible War, and Putin's Games, to name just a few from last season. Today The Passionate Eye remains one of the only documentary strands in Canada where viewers can still see a selection of the world's best and most newsworthy political and social issue documentaries.

Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other and killed each other in great numbers - if only to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive of how that was possible. What began as a bitter dispute over Union and States' Rights, ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America.

This series explores the history of the major American musical form. We track its development in African American culture, its rise to prominence with its golden age of popularity spanning from the 1920's to the mid 1940's both in its original form and in Swing through its popular decline and the rise of vital new sub-genres into the present day. Along the way, we learn of the lives and work of major contributors to the form such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Charlie "Bird" Parker and many others who helped form Jazz into the vibrant musical form it is. Moreover, we see how the music reflected the political and social issues of the African American community over the course of the form's history.

In his time, Mark Twain was considered the funniest man on earth. Yet he was also an unflinching critic of human nature, using his humor to attack hypocrisy, greed and racism. In this series, Ken Burns has created an illuminating portrait of the man who is also one of the greatest writers in American history.Mark Twain tells the story of the writer's extraordinary life – full of rollicking adventure, stupendous success and crushing defeat, hilarious comedy and almost unbearable tragedy. By the end, the film helps us to see how Twain could claim with some justification, "I am not an American, I am the American."

The War, a seven-part series directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, tells the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of a handful of men and women from four quintessentially American towns: Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota. The series explores the most intimate human dimensions of the greatest cataclysm in history — a worldwide catastrophe that touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America — and demonstrates that in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives. Including interviews and archive footage, the film honors the bravery, endurance, and sacrifice of the generation of Americans who lived through what will always be known simply as "The War."

Prohibition tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed.

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History chronicles the lives of Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, three members of the most prominent and influential family in American politics. It is the first time in a major documentary television series that their individual stories have been interwoven into a single narrative. This seven-part, fourteen-hour film follows the Roosevelts for more than a century, from Theodore's birth in 1858 to Eleanor's death in 1962. Over those years, Theodore would become the 26th President of the United States, and his beloved niece, Eleanor, would marry his fifth cousin, Franklin, who became the 32nd President of the United States. Together, these three individuals not only redefined the relationship Americans had with their government and with each other, but also redefined the role of the United States within the wider world. The series encompasses the history the Roosevelts helped shape: the creation of National Parks, the digging of the Panama Canal, the passage of innovative New Deal programs, the defeat of Hitler, and the postwar struggles for civil rights at home and human rights abroad. It is also an intimate human story about love, betrayal, family loyalty, personal courage, and the conquest of fear.

Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies tells the complete story of cancer, from its first description in an ancient Egyptian scroll to the gleaming laboratories of modern research institutions. At six hours, the film interweaves a sweeping historical narrative; with intimate stories about contemporary patients; and an investigation into the latest scientific breakthroughs that may have brought us, at long last, to the brink of lasting cures.

Jackie Robinson explores how the civil rights movement dovetailed with Robinson's baseball career.Jack Roosevelt Robinson rose from humble origins to cross baseball's color line and become one of the most beloved men in America. A fierce integrationist, Robinson used his immense fame to speak out against the discrimination he saw on and off the field, angering fans, the press, and even teammates who had once celebrated him for "turning the other cheek." After baseball, he was a widely-read newspaper columnist, divisive political activist and tireless advocate for civil rights, who later struggled to remain relevant as diabetes crippled his body and a new generation of leaders set a more militant course for the civil rights movement.

In an immersive 360-degree narrative, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick tell the epic story of the Vietnam War as it has never before been told on film. The Vietnam War features testimony from nearly 100 witnesses.

The Gene: An Intimate History brings vividly to life the story of today's revolution in medical science through present-day tales of patients and doctors at the forefront of the search for genetic treatments, interwoven with a compelling history of the discoveries that made this possible and the ethical challenges raised by the ability to edit DNA with precision. 

Hemingway interweaves a close study of the biographical events of the author's life with excerpts from his fiction, non-fiction and short stories, informed by interviews with celebrated writers, scholars and Hemingway's son, Patrick. The filmmakers explore the painstaking process through which Hemingway created some of the most important works of fiction in American letters, including novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea; short stories "Hills Like White Elephants," "The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "Up in Michigan," "Indian Camp" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro;" as well as the nonfiction works Death in the Afternoon and A Moveable Feast.

Shot over four years in maximum and medium security prisons in New York State, the four-hour film takes viewers on a stark and intimate journey into one of the most pressing issues of our time – our failure to provide meaningful rehabilitation for the over two million Americans living behind bars. Through the personal stories of the students and their families, the film reveals the transformative power of higher education and puts a human face on America's criminal justice crisis. It raises questions we urgently need to address: What is prison for? Who has access to educational opportunity? Who among us is capable of academic excellence? How can we have justice without redemption?

The Dust Bowl chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, in which the frenzied wheat boom of the "Great Plow-Up", followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation. Vivid interviews with twenty-six survivors of those hard times, combined with dramatic photographs and seldom seen movie footage, bring to life stories of incredible human suffering and equally incredible human perseverance. It is also a morality tale about our relationship to the land that sustains us—a lesson we ignore at our peril.

Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature's most spectacular locales – from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska - The National Parks: America's Best Idea is nonetheless a story of people: people from every conceivable background – rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs; people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy.

A two-part examination of the life of Thomas Jefferson, whose career as statesman and founding father, including authoring the Declaration of Independence and becoming the third President, places him in the pantheon of historic figures. With Sam Waterston as Jefferson. Narrated by Ossie Davis.

The West is a series that includes stories of the Native American experience, from the era before Europeans appeared on the landscape to the tragic days of Sand Creek, Washita and Wounded Knee; stories of the Spanish West, from the times of the conquistadors' expeditions to the emergence of the barrio as an enclave of cultural traditions; pioneer stories from the Oregon Trail and the Mormon Exodus; war stories from San Jacinto and Lawrence, Kansas; stories of miners and missionaries, ranchers and railroaders, educators and industrialists. It is a chronicle that captures all the grandeur of the West and all the energy of its people, and one that probes the conflicting visions and competing values that made an American nation on this vast land.

Pandora's Box was a six part 1992 BBC documentary television series written and produced by Adam Curtis, which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. Curtis' later The Century of the Self had a similar theme. The title sequence made extensive use of clips from the short film Design for Dreaming, as well as other similar archive footage.

The Mayfair Set is a series of programmes produced by Adam Curtis for the BBC. The program looked at how buccaneer capitalists of hot money were allowed to shape the climate of the Thatcher years, focusing on the rise of Colonel David Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith, and Tiny Rowland, all members of The Clermont club in the 1960s. It received the BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series or Strand in 2000.

We are living through strange days.Across Britain, Europe and America societies have become split and polarised not just in politics but across the whole culture. There is anger at the inequality and the ever growing corruption - and a widespread distrust of the elites.And into this has come the pandemic that has brutally dramatised those divisions.But despite the chaos there is a paralysis - a sense that no one knows how to escape from this.This new series of films by Adam Curtis tell the story of how we got to this place. And why both those in power - and we - find it so difficult to move on.The films trace different forces across the world that have led to now, not just in the West, but in China and Russia as well.It covers a wide range - including the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opiods, the history of Artificial Intelligence, melancholy over the loss of empire and, love and power. And whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really part of the new system of power.And the films are told in a different way - they are an emotional history of what went on inside the heads of all kinds of people.Because in the age of the individual - what you felt and what you wanted and what you dreamed of were going to become the driving force across the world.What was forgotten in that age was that much of what we feel is also formed by the society around us. Above all by the power structures.And now those structures are decaying - everywhere - their weakness and uncertainty makes us feel empty and frightened of the future.That is what is paralysing us - and blocking us from imagining different kinds of societies and a better futureCan't Get You Out of My Head is an epic history that shows how and why that happened. How we made this particular world. And that it was not inevitable.

Adam Curtis explores the origins of our contemporary idea of freedom.

A series of three documentaries about the use of fear for political gain.

British filmmaker Adam Curtis examines the different ways that history and memory (both national and individual) have been used and manipulated by politicians and others.

A documentary about the rise of psychoanalysis as a powerful means of persuasion for both governments and corporations.

A series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.

Two women. One allegiance. Together they fought for women everywhere, and their strong willpower and sheer determination still ripples through contemporary society.Recount the trials, tribulations and triumphs of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as they strive to give birth to the women's movement. Not until their deaths was their shared vision of women's suffrage realized.