Television series
American Playhouse
- Drama
- Dip in and out
American Playhouse was PBS's showcase for American theater on television—a rotating anthology of stage plays, adaptations, and original dramatic works. Each episode brings a different story, cast, and sensibility. It's uneven by design, which means discovery: some nights you'll find something transcendent, other nights something perfectly serviceable. For anyone who loves theater but can't always get to it, or who wants to see how television and stage used to talk to each other.
If you liked this
The Skin of Our Teeth1983
Thornton Wilder's wild, inventive play about human survival across millennia. Formally playful and philosophically ambitious, performed with theatrical bravado that TV doesn't usually permit.
But The structure is deliberately fractured and the tone lurches between modes. If you need straightforward narrative momentum, this will frustrate you.
The Accident2019
A taut, psychologically complex drama about how a small moment of negligence spirals into moral and legal chaos. Tense and genuinely thought-provoking about culpability.
But Slow-burn intensity isn't for everyone. There's no catharsis, just reckoning and ambiguity.
Driving Miss Daisy1989
An adaptation of the beloved two-character play tracing a decades-long relationship across the American South. Intimate, warm, and emotionally effective.
But The race politics have aged into something more complicated than the play intends. Some find its treatment of the subject matter insufficient.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from American Playhouse
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
My Brilliant Career1979
Gillian Armstrong's film carries the same DNA as the best American Playhouse productions: it's fundamentally about people with ideas, performed with theatrical intensity on a film set. It's what happens when theater sensibility meets cinema.
A radical film about a young woman choosing art over marriage in turn-of-the-century Australia. It vibrates with theatrical energy and intelligence; watching it feels like witnessing a performance.
But Period piece with a pace that won't rush you. Some find it slow; others find that slowness is the point—the film trusts the viewer completely.
