America Revealed Takes A Behind-the-scenes Look at What Makes the U.S. Tick

Credit: PBS

Survivor winner Yul Kwon gets an eye-opening aerial perspective of how America works

America Revealed delves into the inner workings of American infrastructure

For Survivor winner Yul Kwon, the treachery and hardship of competing in television’s high-stakes survival competition was nothing compared to the precarious situations in which he found himself while hosting America Revealed.

During the course of the series, Kwon rappelled down the side of a massive wind turbine, parachuted from an airplane and even helped repair live electrical wires while strapped to the side of a helicopter. 

As Kwon explains, these were just a few of the dangers he encountered while filming this extraordinary four-part PBS series that takes viewers on an amazing journey through the various infrastructures that keep America running.

“People take a lot of these systems for granted,” says Kwon. “When you turn on the light switch, the light comes on. When you order a pizza from Domino’s, it gets there in 30 minutes. But there’s this vast network of things that have to all come into place and happen at exactly the right time to make these things happen.”

What to Expect on America Revealed

America Revealed delves deep inside this network, using aerial footage and real-time satellite data to illustrate how a head-spinning array of interconnecting systems keep the country running smoothly.

The first episode focuses on the massive agricultural infrastructure responsible for feeding nearly 300 million Americans each day. Subsequent episodes include a look at the complex transportation systems that have made America the world’s most mobile nation (airing April 18), an exploration of how the U.S. power grid delivers electricity via more than 200,000 miles of high-tension transmission lines (April 25) and an episode spotlighting manufacturing, ranging from automobiles to social-media software (May 2). 

According to executive producer Tony Tackaberry, America Revealed “plays out on an epic canvas. It’s about how this extraordinary country runs day by day, hour by hour. That scope allowed us to explore a vast array of stories. Individually, each one is designed to reveal something surprising about four of the biggest systems that we rely on every day. But taken together, they paint a rich, entertaining and faithful picture of how these systems actually work, allowing us to go about our daily lives.”