What Does Demo cracy Look Like? Documentary and the Demos in Public Television

This chapter analyzes the contradictions of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) as a major platform for documentary programming in the United States. Drawing from political theory, it traces the formative relationship between public television, documentary, and postwar understandings of liberal democracy and its subjects. Observational, investigative, and serialized storytelling are used to take the documentary form in new dimensions, with PBS, perhaps too cautious about mass democracy in its earlier days, taking the lead in a process of reinvigorating civic practice and popular democratic possibilities within the documentary form. Taking the criminal justice reform docuseries Philly D.A. (2021) as a case study, this chapter highlights the alternative vision of independent producers who envision both democracy and public television in more popular, advocacy-oriented, and participatory terms.