Television series

Frontline

Name: Frontline
Genre: Documentary, Drama
Released: 1983
Cast: Will Lyman

Other titles called Frontline: the 1994 series (ABC).

Dip in and out

Frontline is PBS's flagship documentary series, now running over forty years. Each episode investigates a single urgent story—corruption, conflict, health crises, institutions failing—with the rigour of investigative journalism and the narrative shape of drama. It's for people who want to understand how the world actually works, not how it's supposed to.

TVMaze rating

3.6

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you enjoy patient, reported journalism that builds an argument from interviews, records and on-the-ground footage, and you don't mind sitting with a single hard question for an hour.

Skip it if you want a story with characters you follow across a plot, since each episode is a separate investigation with new people and no through-line for the whole run.

What it asks of you: Expect an unhurried hour at a time, talk-heavy with long interviews and dense argument rather than music-driven momentum; subjects are often grim, so pace yourself.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

The Facebook Dilemma2018

A two-part reckoning with Facebook's business model, its impact on elections, and its indifference to consequences. This was before we all knew; Frontline got there early and got the detail right.

But Some of the tech explanations feel dated now. The moral clarity you might want doesn't arrive—just facts and questions.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Frontline

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Act of Killing2012

Both treat investigations as structural encounters with powerful people avoiding accountability. Oppenheimer and Frontline both understand that showing how power operates often means letting the guilty talk.

Indonesian death-squad killers direct themselves reenacting their own murders. Joshua Oppenheimer's film is documentary as psychological horror—these men perform their crimes in fantasy settings, revealing something true through artifice. It's unlike anything else.

But It's methodologically strange and morally vertiginous. You watch people enjoy describing atrocity. Some will reject it as a dangerous game; others will find it vital.

Nocebo2022

Frontline investigates how systems create harm that feels real to those harmed. Nocebo does the same with psychology and belief. Both ask: who decides what's true?

An Italian psychological thriller about a woman convinced her clothes are poisoning her. It's Riz Ahmed and Cate Blanchett in a story that explores how belief shapes reality, how we harm ourselves with fear. Completely different in tone but structurally a mirror.

But It's oblique and takes its time. The diagnosis comes late, if at all. Some will find it pretentious; others will miss the point.