Next to its lineup of kids' programming, when the average person thinks of PBS, they likely think of the network’s impressive lineup of documentary series, including Frontline, American Experience and Nova.
Raney Aronson-Rath is the editor-in-chief overseeing GBH’s documentary programming, which includes American Experience, Frontline and Nova. She is also an Oscar-winning producer and has been executive producer and editor-in-chief of Frontline for the past decade.
American Experience recently announced several new projects, including the three-part documentary series Lindbergh, which premieres in May 2027. Ken Burns will be the executive producer of the project, teaming up with acclaimed director/writer Stephen Ives.
The other major documentary coming from American Experience is a four-part series, The Bureau: A Secret History of the FBI, directed by Sharon Grimberg and Sarah Colt, “charting the rise, weaponization, and survival of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency.”
I recently spoke with Aronson-Rath about those projects and what to expect from Frontline and Nova. We all discussed the impact of the federal funding cuts on the shows and how she has learned to lean into the new digital audience:
How does that digital long tail impact the production of these shows? Where you have the opportunity of deciding, “Look, don’t just discard that footage because it doesn’t fit in the completed thing. We can use it elsewhere.”
We can pop that on YouTube. We can do a short and put it on TikTok. For example, how does that change your production flow for Frontline, which you’re probably the most intimately involved with?
Raney Aronson-Rath: So one of the big changes for Frontline has been that we started to share our underlying interviews. We did that as an act of transparency. I did that as a trust-building exercise to bolster our democracy. It was a high-minded idea.
However, what we found is millions of people love to watch the uncut, unedited versions of interviews. And that's just like, who knew about that community? Then we have the micro shorts that we're really all pushing into so aggressively.
So basically, everything that you film is now important. Everything that you film actually needs to be archived, has to be shared. And it just is amazing how much you can get out of a single documentary process now across social, across digital, across text.
So it’s actually an exciting time for filmmakers. Who are really used to gathering materials and making a bespoke version of what they've gathered, fact-based and fair, but they've really spent a lot of time in the edit room making it that story. That was a little disruptive for my filmmaking team at Frontline, but I would say most everyone has embraced it because they see the upside. We're reaching a younger generation.
We're reaching millions of new people. We're now 60% global at Frontline, which is amazing. And that's because of our reach across the YouTube landscape with all these new properties in addition to our films.
You can read the entire interview on Forbes and it will be available on TooMuchTV after a five-day delay.