America Divided - Season 1

Common returns to his hometown of Chicago – a city on fire in the aftermath of the brutal police killing of teenager Laquan McDonald. With thousands of people in the streets, Chicago has become the epicenter of national debates around police violence, racism and accountability. Working with community activists and whistleblowers, Common discovers a decades-long pattern of police corruption and sophisticated cover-ups that stretch all the way to the mayor's office. But Common also finds reason for hope. An energized movement in the streets mounts unprecedented pressure for reform. It's clear that the system is broken — is it finally time for a change?

Norman Lear explores the housing divide in New York City, where he is confronted by one of the nation's starkest images of inequality: a record number of homeless people living in the shadows of luxury skyscrapers filled with apartments purposely being kept empty. The creator of "All in the Family," "Good Times" and "The Jeffersons" speaks with tenants, realtors, homeless people, housing activists, landlords and city officials — investigating the Big Apple's affordability crisis, hedge fund speculation on residential housing, and a legacy of racist discrimination that still persists today.

While most people are aware of the basic contours of the Flint water story, America Divided goes deeper. Correspondent Rosario Dawson investigates how a government could poison its own citizens, what hidden forces may have been at work, and how specific policies unique to Michigan, led not only to the crisis in Flint but also damaged other poor, largely African American communities around the state.

Jesse Williams journeys to the Gulf Coast town of St. Petersburg, Florida, once known for its beaches and pleasant weather, but now notorious for being the unlikely epicenter of the student achievement gap and school-to- prison pipeline. Williams investigates how resegregation has led to a massive educational and criminal justice divide for the students — and witnesses the community's efforts to confront the school system and heal the divide.

In the 21st century, we have seen the withering of middle-class life in America. Manufacturing, which once held out the promise of a middle-class life for those with a high school education, has shed five million jobs since 2000. Now, as Americans grapple with the growing inequality, something startling is happening to working class white America: an epidemic of suicide and drug and alcohol-related deaths across the heartland. Since 1999, this epidemic has resulted in nearly half a million early deaths — a figure comparable to all the lives lost to AIDS in the US. In "The Epidemic," Peter Sarsgaard — whose own family has battled with drug addiction — travels to Dayton, Ohio, to investigate how the city, once the very definition of industrial invention and middle-class America, has become the epicenter of an epidemic and a symbol of our age of inequality.

As the fate of some 11 million undocumented immigrants has become the political football of the 2016 campaign, actress America Ferrera heads to Texas, the state with the longest border and home to 1.65 million people living without papers. Ferrera, whose parents and siblings are immigrants from Honduras, understands the challenges faced by the new arrivals to the U.S. fleeing in Central America. In "Out of Reach," she witnesses the special difficulties for Central American refugees in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where US Border Patrol checkpoints inside the US, many miles from the border, keep undocumented people hemmed-in and place the American dream out of reach.

North Carolina — perhaps more than any other state in the Union — has been transformed by the new and growing tidal wave of political spending. Zach Galifianakis, the comic star of "The Hangover" movies, travels back to his home state to investigate how North Carolina has become a bellwether for how the money of a few has come to dominate our democracy. Galifianakis investigates allegations that the current state government was put in power by moneyed interests and has thus carried out a program that only benefits its backers: cuts to education, healthcare spending and environmental protection; lowering of taxes for the wealthy and corporations; and the passage of laws designed to roll back access to the ballot.

Amy Poehler ventures into the world of the invisible women who help keep the California economy afloat: domestic workers. What she finds is a human story far more complex than the simple exploitation of poor women by the super-rich. While domestic workers organize for a living wage, some of their employers are also struggling — squeezed out of the middle class in an increasingly unequal economy in which everyone works harder than they used to.