Premieres Tuesday, July 23, 2024at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS App + Encore Thursday, July 25 at 9 p.m. on KPBS 2
It’s a central premise of the American dream: If you’re willing to work hard, you’ll be able to make a living and build a better life for your children. But what if working hard isn’t enough to get ahead — or even to ensure your family’s basic financial stability? “Two American Families: 1991-2024,” a special, two-hour documentary filmed over more than 30 years, is a portrait of perseverance from FRONTLINE and Bill Moyers that raises unsettling questions about the changing nature of the American economy and the impact on people struggling to make a living.
This is the saga of two families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — one Black, the Stanleys, and one white, the Neumanns — who have spent the past 34 years battling to keep from sliding into poverty, and who refuse to give up despite the economic challenges that their stories reveal.
“There are so many people struggling the same way with the cost of everything and not getting enough on your paycheck to cover your monthly expenses,” said Terry Neumann, who was a young mom when Bill Moyers and his producers, Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes, began filming with her and is now a great-grandmother. “It's like we haven't come very far.”
“There’s something that I always say: ‘So a man thinketh, so is he,’” said Jackie Stanley, the matriarch of the Stanley family. “If I think poverty all the time, I’ll act that way. I can’t afford to talk negative and then allow my children to see me that way, down or depressed.”
When the team first began documenting the lives of the Stanleys and the Neumanns in 1991, both families’ breadwinners had lost well-paying manufacturing jobs. The families were struggling to adapt to a new, global economy and the trend towards part-time, lower-wage work.
“When I got laid off, they wanted me to go on welfare, but I could not stand in that line,” Claude Stanley said at the time. “I just said, it’s not me … I got my strength, my health; I’m going to find me a job.”
“It really bothers us that we have to depend on other people,” said Terry Neumann. “You just want to get up and … go in the car and go grocery shopping and have a normal life again.”
With profound intimacy, "Two American Families: 1991-2024" chronicles the stories of the Neumanns and the Stanleys across six presidential administrations – offering a powerful window into how they and their now-grown children have fared while trying to stay afloat in an economy that has presented challenge after challenge for them. For the full story on how the Stanleys and the Neumanns are doing today, watch this film.
The film is the fifth installment in a series of widely-praised PBS documentaries following the two families that began in 1992 with "Minimum Wages: The New Economy," and continued with three more films — a 1995 collaboration with FRONTLINE called "Living on the Edge," a 2000 PBS special called "Surviving the Good Times" and the 2013 FRONTLINE documentary "Two American Families."
The New Yorker wrote that the latter film would “take its place among the central documents of our time,” and Variety said “It demands to be seen and discussed.”
Watch On Your Schedule: “Two American Families: 1991-2024” will be available to stream in full at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS App starting July 23, 2024.
Credits: A FRONTLINE production with Okapi Productions LLC and Public Affairs Television, Inc. in association with Left/Right Docs. Produced and directed by Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes. The co-producer is Andrew Fredericks. Written by Kathleen Hughes. The correspondent is Bill Moyers. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath. Distributed by PBS International.
