A New PBS Documentary Offers a Gentle Message to Our Polarized Times. I Hated It.

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Philadelphia’s collar counties are some of the most sought-after real estate in American politics, the swingingest part of a critical swing state. And Bucks County, which sprawls northward along the New Jersey border, is the most evenly divided of them all. In 2024, the county cast more than 400,000 votes for president; Donald Trump won by fewer than 300. So it was a shock even to some locals when the Bucks County school board took a massive turn to the right in 2021, with a newly radicalized Republican majority pulling books from school libraries and banning pride flags and other symbols of support from the classroom. It must have seemed like the perfect spot for Barry Levinson and Robert May to set a five-episode docuseries on the political polarization of America, centered on the friendship between two high school girls whose parents hold vastly different political views.

Bucks County, USA generated controversy even before it aired, when a scheduled screening at Bucks County Community College was abruptly canceled for unspecified safety concerns last week. But you wouldn’t know it from the giggly camaraderie between Evi Casey, an effervescent theater kid who favors tulle skirts and goes gaga for Hamilton , and Vanessa Martino, a bright STEM kid who speaks in bunched-up clusters. The two might seem like an odd pair even if it weren’t for the political divisions between their families. But the strength of their friendship serves as an implicit rebuke to the grown-ups around them: If the kids can look past their differences, why can’t you? With its first episode debuting on PBS a year and a half after the first two episodes premiered at Sundance, the series poses the same question to its intended audience of well-heeled centrists: Can’t we just handle our differences like adults?

Evi and Vanessa’s parents, however, aren’t just run-of-the-mill voters. Vanessa’s father is Paul Martino, a wealthy venture capitalist who spent half a million dollars backing far-right candidates for the Bucks County school board in 2021. The unprecedented sum had the desired effect in Bucks County but also fanned the flames of similar movements across the country, as parents radicalized by pandemic school closures and exposure to their children’s virtual classrooms pushed back at the schools’ influence over their children’s lives. Things, as Bucks County, USA periodically reminds us, got ugly fast. The screen regularly fills with vitriolic comments taken from social media, and an audio collage near the beginning features unidentified voices listing all the things they’ve been called: Bigot. Pedophile. COVID denier. Anti-American. Nazi.

Where Levinson and May get into trouble is in treating those epithets as equivalent, as if bigot and transphobe were merely unkind insults, out of bounds no matter how extreme the views of the people they’re describing.