Frontline finished the rough cut of ‘The Choice’ and then started over

For America’s undecided voters this election season: PBS’ Frontline premiere ‘The Choice 2024: Harris vs. Trump” on Tuesday night, a two-hour documentary series about the election season that presents the lives and views of both candidates through a combination of research and interviews. .

This marks the latest episode of “The Choice,” an election year special that has been presented on Frontline every presidential year since 1988. The latest edition was directed by Michael Kirk (“America After 9/11”), who has captured Washington for Frontline for more than 30 years and has created the past six episodes of “The Choice.”

“(This series) is all about discovering each candidate’s method of living and then measuring the development of the method of living and comparing the two,” says Kirk.

‘The Choice 2024′ is based on dozens of interviews with Harris and Trump’s friends, advisers and critics. Kirk also interviewed authors, journalists and political insiders to present the storylines of both candidates’ lives, dating back to their childhoods. The documentary is a concise and concise history of each candidate’s rise to nomination.

For undecided American voters, the document and the intertwined investigative biographies of both major party candidates could be a game changer. But Frontline executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath says the goal is to reach both undecided and decided voters with “nuanced, fact-based reporting on each candidate.”

“Regardless of whether you’ve already decided who you’re going to vote for, it’s still important to know who you’re going to vote for,” Aronson-Rath said. “To know what they believe in, where they come from and where their values ​​lie.”

In early July, Kirk and Aronson-Rath showed a four-hour version of “The Choice 2024” with Trump and President Joe Biden.

“Our goal was to get it down to three hours, and on July 21, Harris announced her 2024 campaign for president,” the director says. “There was no official documentary about Harris and no definitive biography of her. Our archivist said, ‘I can’t find much on the networks, etc. I don’t know how you’re going to make an hour of her life in seven weeks. But we did.”

To follow Harris’ journey from Berkeley in the 1960s, through her rise as a prosecutor, her entry into California politics, and then her time in Washington, DC, first as a senator, then as the first Black, South Asian and female vice president: ‘The Choice 2024 team spoke with Harris’ childhood friends, classmates, advisers in California and the White House, and journalists covering her career.

In the film, Lateefah Simon, who worked for Harris when she was a district attorney in San Francisco, says: “Kamala Harris demands respect. If it is not given to her, she demands it.”

To chronicle Trump’s path from New York real estate to entertainment to politics, the documentary features interviews from Trump’s campaign days from 2016 to the present, including his niece, business and television associates, biographers and advisers who worked with him worked together in the White House. .

“This is an opportunity for Donald Trump to become the winner he needs to be,” biographer Marc Fisher says in the document.

While the 2020 edition of “The Choice” focused on the idea of ​​a crisis, the 2024 episode consists of fighters.

In the opening scene of the documentary, Frontline narrator Will Lyman says: “In a divided nation, two very different candidates face off. A vice president with a meteoric rise who broke barriers along the way. A former president who spent decades in the spotlight, always determined to be the winner at all costs. Two fighters. Someone looking for vindication and promising a return to greatness. The other tries to get past the past and promise a great future.’

“Halfway through the rough cut, it struck me that both of these people (Harris and Trump) were fighters,” Aronson-Rath says. “They are fighting for very different ideas and very different policies, but their way of life was so similar. For Trump, his promise is really about looking back at America and fighting for it. For Kamala Harris, it’s about the present to the future.”

Watch the trailer for the doc here.

“The Choice 2024” premieres on PBS and begins streaming Tuesday on YouTube and on Frontline’s website and in the PBS app. The film will also be available to stream on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel.