FACING THE STORM: STORY OF THE AMERICAN BISON

SATURDAY, APRIL 28 @ 8:00PM

Tens of millions of bison once roamed North America. For 10,000 years, Native Americans on the Great Plains had a sacred relationship with the animal, relying on it for food, clothing, and shelter. But with the arrival of European Americans and their Manifest Destiny, ready to conquer the West and all of its resources, bison became nearly extinct, and Plains culture was forever changed.

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MONEY, POWER AND WALL STREET

TUESDAY, APRIL 24 @ 7:00PM & 10:00PM

Since 2008, Wall Street and Washington have fought against the tide of the fiercest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Now, FRONTLINE’s veteran financial and political producers Martin Smith (College Inc., The Madoff Affair) and Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown, The Warning), team up to present the inside story of the struggles to rescue and repair a shattered economy, exploring key decisions, missed opportunities and the unprecedented and uneasy partnership between government leaders and titans of finance.

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BIRDSONG

SUNDAY, APRIL 22 @ 7:00PM & 11:30PM

Lieutenant Stephen Wraysford is stationed in the trenches of the western front in France in 1916. But Stephen’s mind is elsewhere, reliving his relationship with Isabelle Azaire, the married woman he met and fell in love with in Amiens during the summer of 1910.

Stephen is ordered to oversee the men digging a tunnel under no-man’s-land to the German trenches, and arrives just in time to witness the deadly effects of a flash flood in the tunnel. Tunneler Jack Firebrace is the last man out, bearing news of the death of one of the men.

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BOUNDARIES

FRIDAY, APRIL 20 @ 7:00PM & 12:00 AM

“Boundaries” from Season 6 of “Art in the Twenty-First Century” (2012), features artists David Altmejd, Tabaimo, assume vivid astro focus, and Lynda Benglis.

Who and what limits our freedom of expression? In what ways do cultural differences affect our understanding of art and other forms of communication? How do an artist’s process and choice of medium affect our perception of his or her work? This episode features artists who synthesize disparate aesthetic traditions, present taboo subject matter, discover innovative uses of media, and explore the shape-shifting potential of the human figure.

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REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR

THURSDAY, APRIL 19 @ 8:00PM & 11:00PM

In 2006, as many as 5,000 modern electric cars were destroyed by the major car companies that built them. That automotive massacre was documented in Chris Paine’s documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?

Today, the electric car is back with a vengeance. In Revenge of the Electric Car, Paine is back, taking his crew behind the closed doors of Nissan, General Motors, the Silicon Valley start-up Tesla Motors, and an independent car converter named Greg “Gadget” Abbott to find the story of the global resurgence of electric cars. With the goal of weaning the country off of foreign oil, this new generation of automobiles promises to be America’s future: fast, furious, and cleaner than ever.

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EPISODE 2 ~ NATION ON THE MOVE

MONDAY, APRIL 23, 8:00PM & 11:00PM

America is a nation of vast distances and dense urban clusters, woven together by 200,000 miles of railroads, 5,000 airports, and 4 million miles of roads.

These massive, complex transportation systems combine to make Americans the most mobile people on earth.  In this episode, host Yul Kwon journeys across the continent by air, road and rail.

He ventures behind the scenes with the workers who get us where we need to go; at the Federal Aviation Administration command center, he listens in on a call with NASA, the secret service, the military, and every major airline to learn how our national flight plan works today.

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THE REAL CSI

THURSDAY, JULY 18 @ 7:00PM

How reliable is the science behind forensics? FRONTLINE finds serious flaws in some of the best-known tools of forensic science and wide inconsistencies in how forensic evidence is presented in the courtroom.

In 2004, cognitive neoroscientist Itiel Dror set out to examine whether the process of fingerprint analysis, long considered one of the most reliable forms of forensic science, can be biased by the knowledge examiners have when they attempt to find a match for prints from a crime scene.

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THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD

SUNDAY, APRIL 15 @ 7:00PM & 11:00PM

John Jasper is a troubled man, his psyche split between darkness and light. He has spent his life in the stifling and claustrophobic cathedral village of Cloisterham in a state of frustrated ambition, and has become addicted to opium in an attempt to still his ennui and expand his horizons. But the opium is fracturing Jasper’s mind so that even as his soul reaches for the sublime in his music, his darker self has conceived a murderous hatred of his nephew Edwin Drood, who, he believes, stands between him and the lovely Rosa Bud. When two orphan twins Neville and Helena Landless arrive in town, Jasper’s dark desires take shape and morph into shocking, drug-fueled action. Jasper’s obsessions push him closer to the edge of sanity, while the most disturbing secrets of Cloisterham remain buried.

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CHANGE

FRIDAY, APRIL 13 @ 7:00PM & 12:00AM

“Art in the Twenty-First Century” Season Six includes 13 profiles of artists from five continents gathered into four, one-hour thematic episodes: Change, Balance, History and Boundaries. Spanning the globe from Nigeria to New York City, from Beijing to Brazil, the programs reveal the artists at work and speaking in their own words as they demonstrate the power of art to alter perception, challenge convention, and change how we see the world around us.

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