Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
SERIES INTRODUCTION
What you are about to read is a satirical American history told in ten seasons, and it is the story of a nation that was founded on the most beautiful sentence ever written and then immediately began arguing about what it meant. A country that has, at various points, been the greatest hope of human civilization and the clearest possible argument against it, sometimes on the same Tuesday. America has survived a civil war, four presidential assassinations, two world wars, one Great Depression, seventeen lesser depressions, a disco era, and a period in which a significant portion of the population genuinely believed that a man who sold steaks in a hotel lobby should command the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. It is still here. This is either inspiring or terrifying depending on your ZIP code, your tax bracket, your skin color, the language you speak at home, or whether the algorithm has gotten to you yet.
This is not a balanced account. History isn’t balanced. History is a bar fight where the winners get to write the police report. If you came here looking for funny US history delivered with the moral clarity of a textbook and the restraint of a tenured professor, you have taken a very wrong turn. What follows is ten seasons of the most exhausting, most violent, most occasionally magnificent, most consistently hypocritical show ever greenlit. Nobody approved this premise. Nobody could have. And yet: here we are.
Settle in. There are no commercial breaks. There is no satisfying finale. There is only the next episode, loading.
SEASON 1: “Somebody Else’s Land” (1492–1692)
Columbus sails west looking for India, finds the Bahamas, declares victory, and spends the rest of his life insisting he’s right in the way that only men who are catastrophically, humiliatingly, historically wrong ever truly commit to insisting they’re right. Europe, a continent that had just finished the Black Death and thought “you know what, let’s try something new,” proceeds to export smallpox, Catholicism, and the concept of land ownership to people who had been doing fine without any of it for forty thousand years, which is a longer run than any empire Europe ever produced, but sure, let’s call it a discovery. The Pilgrims, a religious sect so insufferable that England literally paid for their boat to make them leave, wash ashore in 1620, immediately die in enormous numbers, are saved by the Wampanoag people, eat a meal, say thanks, and then spend the next two centuries not saying thanks with increasing enthusiasm and decreasing ceremony. The season ends in Salem, where a group of Puritans, bored out of their minds and spiritually marinating in repression at the edge of a dark forest, decide that several of their neighbors are witches. The alternative explanation, that teenage girls are sometimes dramatic and adults in power are sometimes cowards, was apparently too theologically complex to consider.
SEASON 2: “Taxation Without Representation or Self-Awareness” (1693–1775)
The colonies settle into a comfortable routine of growing tobacco, distilling rum, delivering sermons at a length that would make a modern podcast host feel seen, and enslaving approximately 400,000 human beings so that a leisure class of powdered-wig enthusiasts can have enough free time to write pamphlets about liberty. Britain, having spent a fortune defending the colonies from France in a war the colonists arguably started, tries to recoup the cost by taxing them a nickel on a stamp. The colonists, who are completely fine with everything mentioned above, decide that THIS is the tyranny that demands blood. The cognitive dissonance required to hold all of this together without one’s skull simply exploding is the first great American innovation, and any humorous American history that doesn’t lead with that fact is pulling its punches. Ben Franklin, a large man who flew a kite and called it science, becomes the world’s first celebrity intellectual and spends most of the revolution in Paris eating cheese and charming noblewomen, which is either brilliant diplomacy or a very comfortable retirement, and the distinction may not matter. The Boston Tea Party dumps British tea into the harbor, which is the 18th-century equivalent of posting “I’m done with this platform” and then continuing to use the platform.
SEASON 3: “Bless This Mess” (1776–1820)
A roomful of slave-owning lawyers write the most celebrated document in human history and cannot agree on whether “all men” means all men or all men with a very important asterisk to be resolved at a later date that never comes. The Declaration of Independence is drafted by Thomas Jefferson, who owned 600 people and wrote “all men are created equal” without his hand catching fire, which raises questions about divine editorial standards that theologians have been quietly avoiding ever since. George Washington wins a revolution mostly by not losing it, becomes president, and then voluntarily gives up power, a decision so historically unprecedented that European monarchs reportedly heard about it and assumed something had been lost in translation. The Constitutional Convention is eleven weeks of brilliant men in Philadelphia sweating through their breeches and carefully constructing a document that solves every problem except the enormous one in the room, which they agree to leave for future generations as a kind of booby-trapped inheritance. Hamilton and Burr settle a policy disagreement via pistol at dawn. Aaron Burr shoots the man who would end up on the ten-dollar bill and is never imprisoned for it, which remains the most on-brand legal outcome in American history.
SEASON 4: “God Told Me This Was Yours” (1820–1860)
America, having more or less finished being terrible on the Eastern Seaboard, discovers it can be terrible in an entirely new compass direction and calls this destiny. Manifest Destiny is the theological argument that God, creator of the universe and everything in it, had a specific opinion about the California real estate market, and that opinion was: give it to us. The Trail of Tears forcibly removes the Cherokee nation from Georgia to Oklahoma on foot in winter, because the Supreme Court had ruled they could stay and Andrew Jackson responded with the constitutional equivalent of “make me.” Texas is annexed. California is annexed. Mexico looks at its northern border and begins composing a letter it will never send. Meanwhile slavery, which the Founding Fathers had stuffed into the constitution’s crawl space and nailed the door shut, has expanded into a $3 billion industry underwriting the entire Southern economy, and the South has by now constructed a complete philosophical, theological, and aesthetic framework for why this is not only acceptable but beautiful, ordained by scripture, and essential to civilization, a position they will spend the next 160 years slowly rewording but never actually abandoning.
SEASON 5: “Six Hundred Thousand Dead and Still No Resolution” (1861–1877)
The Civil War is America’s bloodiest attempt to avoid an awkward conversation. The South secedes over slavery, then immediately begins a public relations campaign insisting it was about states’ rights, which is the same energy as a man burning down his house and insisting it was about property rights. Lincoln holds the Union together through four years of industrialized slaughter, issues the Emancipation Proclamation, wins the war, gives a speech at Gettysburg that takes three minutes and makes every other speech in recorded history look like it needed a better editor, and is then shot in the head at the theater by a failed actor, which is a sentence so cosmically, operatically ironic that Shakespeare would have cut it from a draft for being too obvious. Reconstruction briefly offers something resembling justice before the country decides that accountability is exhausting and settles for a series of compromises that will simmer at the temperature of a low-grade national infection for the next hundred and fifty years. The formerly enslaved are offered forty acres and a mule, both of which are taken back before the ink dries, and the Supreme Court rules that “separate but equal” is a perfectly coherent phrase, which it uses with a straight face, in public, in writing, and nobody is disbarred.
SEASON 6: “Please Sir, I Want Some More Railroad Monopoly” (1877–1917)
The Gilded Age is what happens when you let a dozen men own everything and then write laws by asking those same men what laws they’d prefer. Carnegie builds libraries with the fortune generated by steel mills where workers lose fingers at a rate Carnegie does not discuss in the libraries. Rockefeller controls 90% of American oil and responds to antitrust complaints with the serene confidence of a man who has never once considered that the rules might apply to him. J.P. Morgan has a facial condition that makes his nose look like a question being asked in the wrong room, and his employees reportedly could not look directly at it, which honestly sounds like a negotiating advantage. Children work twelve-hour days in coal mines because the market had not yet developed the emotional vocabulary to feel bad about this. Teddy Roosevelt arrives like a golden retriever that has read every book ever written and decided to take all of them personally. He busts trusts, builds the Panama Canal, establishes the national park system, charges up hills in Cuba for fun, wrestles bears recreationally, and conducts foreign policy on the general principle that if you speak softly and carry a big stick, you can skip the speaking softly part. Also, he is shot in the chest before a scheduled speech, discovers the bullet has lodged in his ribcage, and decides the most reasonable response is to deliver the speech anyway for ninety minutes while actively bleeding, after which he allows someone to look at the bullet. He is not a man so much as an argument that men are not trying hard enough. He will have a cousin. The cousin will be worse. Worse meaning better. This family is a problem.
SEASON 7: “The Disaster Decade Stack” (1918–1945)
America comes home from WWI, learns absolutely nothing, and invents the 1920s, a decade of jazz, speakeasies, casual cocaine, and financial instruments so elaborately fraudulent that they would make a modern crypto evangelist blush and then probably take notes. The party ends in October 1929 when the stock market discovers, with genuine surprise, that numbers that only go up are actually numbers that eventually go down. The Great Depression is thirteen years of men standing in breadlines while Herbert Hoover explains that the fundamentals are strong. FDR arrives in a wheelchair, which means he cannot run away from any of the problems, and proceeds to create the New Deal, save capitalism from its own bottomless id, win four consecutive presidential elections, and personally hold together an alliance of incompatible egomaniacs long enough to defeat fascism on two simultaneous continents. He does all of this from a seated position, with a cigarette holder and the expression of a man who has already decided how the conversation ends and is simply waiting for you to finish talking. Where his cousin Teddy was all eruption and spectacle, FDR is a cold river that moves everything in its path without raising its voice. Between the two of them, the Roosevelts established a standard for the American presidency that no subsequent occupant has come within comfortable walking distance of, which is either a testament to the family or an indictment of everyone who came after, and it is almost certainly both. The Manhattan Project culminates in two bombs that kill 200,000 people in a combined total of about four seconds, after which the world spends the next 80 years trying to figure out what kind of sentence to put at the end of that.
SEASON 8: “White Picket Fence Over a Mass Grave” (1945–1968)
America emerges from World War II as the only industrialized nation that still has buildings and immediately builds suburbs to fill with veterans, refrigerators, and feelings they were advised not to discuss. The GI Bill sends a generation to college and into homes, distributed with such precise and systematic discrimination that it functions as a wealth transfer machine across racial lines that is still running. Television is invented and begins the long slow work of replacing civic engagement with entertainment, a project it will complete in about 60 years with some help. Joe McCarthy, a drunk senator from Wisconsin with the moral infrastructure of a parking ticket, destroys thousands of careers by pointing at people and implying things, which should have been filed as a warning about the scalability of the technique. Meanwhile, Black Americans, who fought in segregated units to defeat a regime built on racial hierarchy and came home to one, launch the most morally unambiguous movement in American history. A majority of white Americans oppose it in polls at the time and claim to have personally marched in it in retrospect. The season finale is four assassinations, a city on fire, and 500,000 troops in a country nobody can find a good reason to still be in.
SEASON 9: “The Vibe Collapse” (1968–1992)
Vietnam is a war America fought for a decade against an agrarian nation and lost, then spent the following fifty years processing through a cinematic genre in which it won, which is the most American possible response to a loss and does not reflect well on anyone involved. Nixon bugs a hotel room for reasons that have never been adequately explained by any historian or psychiatrist, given that he was already going to win by 500 electoral votes, and then lies about the bugging with such granular, self-incriminating specificity that the lying becomes its own separate crime, which: you have to respect the commitment while absolutely not respecting anything else about it. The 1970s arrive and happen to America the way a stomach virus happens to a wedding. Disco. Stagflation. Three Mile Island. A hostage crisis. Carter puts on a cardigan and asks Americans to sacrifice a little, which they file directly in the trash. Reagan arrives with the warm smile of a man who is about to tell you something that is technically not a lie because he has been convinced it’s true. He cuts taxes for the wealthy, triples the national deficit, funds a secret war using money from a secret arms dealwith the country he’s publicly calling the axis of evil, leaves office with a 63% approval rating, and in doing so establishes a proof of concept that the Republican Party will spend the next four decades testing to destruction. The Cold War ends when the Soviet Union, attempting to reform itself, accidentally ceases to exist, which is the political equivalent of trying to fix a screen door and taking out a load-bearing wall.
SEASON 10: “Buffering… (Please Don’t Cancel Subscription)” (1992–Present)
The internet arrives. Everyone is given a printing press, a global distribution network, and no editorial standards whatsoever, and scholars will debate for centuries whether this was the best or worst thing to happen to the human mind, a debate that will take place on the internet. 9/11 kills 3,000 people in one morning and rewires the national nervous system in ways that no subsequent decade fully repairs. America invades Afghanistan, then Iraq, and spends the next twenty years in both with the grim forward momentum of a man who has forgotten why he walked into a room but feels strongly that leaving would be admitting something. A Black man is elected president and the country experiences, simultaneously, a genuine moment of historic grace and a significant constituency demanding to see his birth certificate, which is the precise psychological portrait of a nation that has never resolved its foundational contradiction and has stopped pretending it’s trying. The 2008 financial collapse destroys the savings of millions of ordinary people, produces zero criminal prosecutions of the people who caused it, and results in several of those people receiving government money and then bonuses, which completes a philosophical arc that would have made the Founders set down their quill pens and simply stare. A reality television host who settled a fraud lawsuit involving a fake university wins the presidency. A pandemic kills over a million Americans while the country argues about whether masks are a form of tyranny, a conversation that would have been incomprehensible to literally any prior generation. The algorithms eat the newspapers. The newspapers eat themselves. Nobody knows what is true. Everyone is certain. The season is still airing. The writers have clearly lost the room. The budget is incomprehensible. The audience is furious.
It is, somehow, still renewed.
AMERICA is the longest-running series in North American broadcasting and the most comedic US history lesson you will ever receive without being charged tuition. It has no coherent narrative arc, an unresolved central conflict, a body count that defies summarizing, and a theme that the writers introduce, abandon, reintroduce, and contradict within the same episode. It has never passed the Bechdel test. It has never met a lesson it couldn’t learn twice. It has produced, in no particular order, the Emancipation Proclamation, the atom bomb, jazz, the suburbs, the Constitution, the internet, the national park system, and the McRib. Critics remain divided. The audience cannot look away.
No prior knowledge of history is required to watch AMERICA. Prior knowledge of history, it turns out, doesn’t help much either.
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His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
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