The BEST episodes of Frontline

#1 - United States of Secrets (Part Two)

Season 2014 - Episode 10 - Aired 5/20/2014

The role of Silicon Valley in the National Security Agency's surveillance program is explored.

#2 - United States of Secrets (Part One)

Season 2014 - Episode 9 - Aired 5/13/2014

The history of the National Security Agency's unprecedented surveillance program is investigated.

#3 - The Merchants of Cool

Season 2001 - Episode 5 - Aired 2/27/2001

FRONTLINE journeys into the world of the marketers of popular culture to teenagers. They spend their days sifting through reams of market research data. They conduct endless surveys and focus groups. They comb the streets, the schools, and the malls, hot on the trail of the "next big thing" that will snare the attention of their prey - a market segment worth an estimated $300 billion a year. They are the merchants of cool: the creators and sellers of popular culture, who have made teens the hottest consumer demographic in America. But are these marketers merely reflecting a growing coarseness in teen culture, or have they helped create it? Are they simply reflecting teen desires or have they begun to manufacture those desires in a bid to secure this lucrative market? And have they gone too far in their attempts to reach the hearts - and wallets - of America's youth?

#4 - Memory of the Camps

Season 1985 - Episode 18 - Aired 5/7/1985

Forty years ago, Allied troops invaded Germany and liberated Nazi death camps. They found unspeakable horrors which still haunt the world's conscience. Frontline presents the world broadcast of a 1945 film made by British and American film crews who were with the troops liberating the camps. The film was directed in part by Alfred Hitchcock and is broadcast for the first time in its entirety on Frontline.

#5 - The Earthquake is Coming

Season 1987 - Episode 2 - Aired 2/3/1987

Frontline examines the startling implications of what will happen when the big earthquake hits California, detailing the awesome effects as systems rupture and the entire nation's economy, industries, and national security are jeopardized.

#6 - Syria Behind the Lines

Season 2013 - Episode 6 - Aired 4/9/2013

An unprecedented film documents the new and perilous reality of everyday life for both Syria’s rebels and its regime.

#7 - Young & Restless In China

Season 2008 - Episode 10 - Aired 6/17/2008

This spring, FRONTLINE explores the generation coming of age in China today. Shot over four years, the film follows a group of nine young Chinese from across the country as they scramble to keep pace with a society changing as fast as any in history. Their stories of ambition and desire, exuberance, crime and corruption are interwoven with moments of heartache and despair. Together they paint an intimate portrait of the generation that is remaking China.

#8 - Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story

Season 2008 - Episode 14 - Aired 11/11/2008

In the wake of yet another hard-fought and bitter presidential campaign, FRONTLINE presents a spirited and revealing biography of Lee Atwater, the charming, Machiavellian godfather of modern, take-no-prisoners Republican political campaigns. Through eye-opening interviews with Atwater's closest friends and adversaries, the film explores the life of the controversial political operative who mentored Karl Rove and George W. Bush, led the GOP to historic victories, and wrote the party's winning playbook. The story tracks Atwater's rise from his beginnings in South Carolina as a high school election kingmaker all the way to the White House and his subsequent battle with cancer and final search for forgiveness and redemption. To Democrats, Atwater was a political assassin who one Congresswoman dubbed "the most evil man in America," but to Republicans he remains a hero for his deep understanding of the American voter and his unapologetic vision of politics as warfare.

#9 - Bush's War, Part 1

Season 2008 - Episode 5 - Aired 3/23/2008

9/11 and Al Qaeda, Afghanistan and Iraq, WMD and the Insurgency, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and the Surge. For six years FRONTLINE has been revealing those stories in meticulous detail, and the political dramas played out at the highest levels -- George W. Bush and Tony Blair, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Osama Bin Laden. Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga will unfold in a special four-hour broadcast over two consecutive nights on PBS, titled Bush's War. Drawing on one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism (FRONTLINE's 40+ films), veteran producer Michael Kirk (Cheney's Law; Endgame; The Lost Year in Iraq; The Dark Side; The Torture Question; Rumsfeld's War; The Man Who Knew; The War Behind Closed Doors; Gunning for Saddam, Target America) also delivers new reporting and fresh interviews. Bush's War will be the definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation's history. "Parts of this history have been told before -- the invasion of Afghanistan, torture, flawed intelligence and the invasion of Iraq, failures in the American occupation, and the saber-rattling over Iran," Kirk says, "But no one has laid out the entire narrative to reveal in one epic story, the scope and detail of how this war began and how it has been fought, both on the ground and deep inside the government."

#10 - Cyber War!

Season 2003 - Episode 9 - Aired 4/24/2003

The Slammer hit on Super Bowl Sunday. Nimda struck one week after 9/11. Code Red had ripped through the system that summer. Moonlight Maze moved from the Russian Academy of Science and into the U.S. Department of Defense. A new form of warfare has broken out and the battleground is cyberspace. With weapons like embedded malicious code, probes and pings, there are surgical strikes, reverse neutron bombs, and the potential for massive assaults aimed directly at America's infrastructure -- the power grid, the water supply, the complex air traffic control system, and the nation's railroads. FRONTLINE investigates the threat of cyber war and reveals what the White House knows that the rest of us don't.

#11 - Inside Japan's Nuclear Meltdown

Season 2012 - Episode 6 - Aired 2/28/2012

FRONTLINE continues its investigation of nuclear safety with an unprecedented account of the crisis inside the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex after a devastating earthquake and tsunami struck Japan on March 11, 2011. With exclusive eyewitness testimony, FRONTLINE tells the story of the workers struggling frantically to reconnect power inside the plant's pitch-dark and highly radioactive reactor buildings; the nuclear experts and officials in the Prime Minister's office fighting to get information as the crisis spiraled out of control; and the plant manager who disobeyed his executives' orders when he thought it would save the lives of his workers. The story profiles the Japanese soldiers and firefighters drafted to cool the reactors, who were wounded when the reactor housings exploded; and the families living near the nuclear plant, who unknowingly fled in the same direction as the radioactive plume, exposing themselves to dangerously high radiation levels.

#12 - Inside Obama's Presidency

Season 2013 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/15/2013

As Barack Obama is sworn in for his second term, FRONTLINE takes a probing look at the first four years of his presidency. With inside accounts from his battles with his Republican opponents over health care and the economy to his dramatic expansion of targeted killings of enemies, FRONTLINE examines the president's key decisions and the experiences that will inform his second term.

#13 - Prison State

Season 2014 - Episode 8 - Aired 4/29/2014

A look at the impact of mass incarceration in America focuses on a housing project in Kentucky.

#14 - Cell Tower Deaths

Season 2012 - Episode 5 - Aired 5/22/2012

The demand for better and faster cell phone service comes with a hidden cost. This joint investigation by FRONTLINE and ProPublica has found that the independent contractors who are building and servicing America's cellular infrastructure are 10 times more likely than an average construction worker to die on the job. Complex layers of subcontracting insulate the carriers against liability, despite the fact that they set the aggressive schedule that can force subcontractors to cut corners in order to meet deadlines.

#15 - The Interrupters

Season 2012 - Episode 4 - Aired 2/14/2012

"The Interrupters" presents profiles in courage, as three former street criminals in Chicago place themselves in the line of fire to protect their communities. The film follows the lives of these "Violence Interrupters," who include the charismatic daughter of one of the city's most notorious former gang leaders, the son of a murdered father, and a man haunted by a killing he committed as a teenager. As they intervene in disputes to prevent violence, they reveal their own inspired journeys of struggle and redemption. From director Steve James (Hoop Dreams) and bestselling author Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here), "The Interrupters" chronicles an intimate, year-long journey across the stubbornly violent landscape of our cities through the eyes of those fighting to sow peace and security.

#16 - The Secret War

Season 2012 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/3/2012

A revealing look at the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan and covert support for elements of the Taliban by the Pakistani military and its intelligence service, the ISI. Contains updates not previously reported.

#17 - Nuclear Aftershocks

Season 2012 - Episode 3 - Aired 1/17/2012

FRONTLINE examines the implications of the Fukushima accident for U.S. nuclear safety, and asks how this disaster will affect the future of nuclear energy around the world.

#18 - Opium Brides

Season 2012 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/3/2012

Young farm girls are caught in the crossfire of attempts to eradicate Afghanistan's drug trade.

#19 - War in Europe (2)

Season 2000 - Episode 6 - Aired 2/29/2000

In the second hour of this analysis of a military effort hampered by diplomatic infighting, senior military leaders -- including Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark, in his first in-depth interview -- tell the story of political constraints, internal divisions and miscalculations that shaped the war in Bosnia.

#20 - Apocalypse! (2)

Season 1999 - Episode 17 - Aired 11/22/1999

In part II of the Apocalypse!, FRONTLINE traces the orgins of the Book of Daniel and how it continues to influence modern apocalyptic thinking. And, they exmamine the anti-Christs of recent history.

#21 - The Released

Season 2009 - Episode 9 - Aired 4/28/2009

This year, hundreds of thousands of prisoners with serious mental illnesses will be released into communities across America, the largest exodus in the nation's history. Typically, mentally ill offenders leave prison with a bus ticket, $75 and two weeks worth of medication. Within eighteen months, nearly two-thirds are re-arrested. In this follow up to the groundbreaking film The New Asylums, FRONTLINE examines what happens to the mentally ill when they leave prison and why they return at such alarming rates. The intimate stories of the released -- along with interviews with parole officers, social workers, and psychiatrists -- provide a rare look at the lives of the mentally ill as they struggle to stay out of prison and reintegrate into society.

#22 - Storm Over Everest

Season 2008 - Episode 9 - Aired 5/13/2008

As darkness fell on May 10, 1996, a fast-moving storm of unimaginable ferocity trapped three climbing teams high on the slopes of Mount Everest. The climbers, exhausted from their summit climb, were soon lost in darkness, in a fierce blizzard, far from the safety of High Camp at...,000 feet. World-renowned climber and filmmaker David Breashears, who aided the rescue efforts back in 1996, now returns to Everest to tell the fuller story of what really happened on that legendary climb. Through remarkably intimate interviews with the climbers and Sherpas -- many who have never spoken before on American television -- Breashears sheds new light on the worst climbing tragedy in Mount Everest's history.

#23 - Organ Farm (2)

Season 2001 - Episode 7 - Aired 4/3/2001

#24 - The Monster that Ate Hollywood

Season 2001 - Episode 18 - Aired 11/22/2001

The box office is booming. New international markets are opening weekly. Amazing advances in technology hold the promise of new delivery systems. Yet there's trouble bubbling just below the surface in Hollywood today as movie industry creative types struggle to adapt to new business realities. On the eve of one of the biggest weekends for new movie releases, FRONTLINE explores the changing Hollywood, revealing how once-fiercely independent studio bosses must now answer to the megacorporations that have swallowed the industry whole.

#25 - Middle School Moment

Season 2012 - Episode 18 - Aired 7/17/2012

How one Bronx school is using a novel form of data collection and analysis to predict and prevent dropouts before they happen.