For those undecided American voters this election season, PBS’ Frontline premiere “The Choice 2024: Harris vs. Trump” on Tuesday evening, a two-hour election-season documentary series that presents both candidate’s lives and views through a combination of investigation and interviews.
This marks the latest installment of “The Choice,” an election-year special presented on Frontline every presidential year since 1988. The latest edition was directed by Michael Kirk (“America After 9/11”), who has chronicled Washington for Frontline for over 30 years and has made the past six installments of “The Choice.”
“(This series) is all about discovering the life method of each candidate and then measuring the development of the life method and the comparison of the two,” says Kirk.
“The Choice 2024” draws on dozens of interviews with Harris and Trump’s friends, advisors and critics. Kirk also interviewed authors, journalists and political insiders to present the narrative arcs of both candidates’ lives, going back to their childhoods. The docu is a dense and succinct history of each candidate’s rise to the nomination.
For undecided American voters, the doc and its interwoven investigative biographies of both major-party candidates could be game-changing. But Frontline executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath says that the goal is to reach both undecided and decided voters with “nuanced, fact-based reporting on each candidate.”
“Regardless if you made your decision on who you will vote for, it’s still important to know about who you are voting for,” says Aronson-Rath. “To know what they believe in and where they came from and where their values lie.”
In early July, Kirk and Aronson-Rath screened a four-hour cut of “The Choice 2024” featuring Trump and President Joe Biden.
“Our aim was to get it down to three hours, and then on July 21, Harris announced her 2024 campaign for president,” the director says. “There was no official documentary about Harris and no definitive biography about her. Our archivist was saying, ‘I’m not finding a lot at the networks, etc. I don’t know how you are going to make an hour out of her life in seven weeks. But we did.”
To trace Harris’ journey from 1960s Berkeley through her rise as a prosecutor, her entry into California politics, and then her time in Washington, D.C., first as a senator, then as the first Black, South Asian and female vice president, “The Choice 2024” team spoke to Harris’ childhood friends, college classmates, advisors in California and the White House, and journalists who have covered her career.
In the film, Lateefah Simon, who worked for Harris when she was the San Francisco District Attorney, states, “Kamala Harris demands respect. If it’s not given to her, she demands it.”
To chronicle Trump’s path from New York real estate to entertainment to politics, the docu features interviews from Trump’s 2016 campaign days through the present, with people including his niece, business and television associates, biographers, and advisors who worked with him in the White House.
“This is, for Donald Trump, a chance to go out the winner he must be,” biographer Marc Fisher says in the doc.
While the 2020 edition of “The Choice” was centered around the idea of crisis, the 2024 installment throughline is fighters.
In the opening sequence of the docu, Frontline narrator Will Lyman states: “In a nation divided, two very different candidates (face) off. A vice president with a meteoric rise who shattered barriers along the way. A former president with decades in the spotlight, always determined to be the winner at any cost. Two fighters. One seeking vindication, promising a return to greatness. The other seeking to move beyond the past, promising a great future.”
“Midway through the rough cut, it occurred to me that both these people (Harris and Trump) were fighters,” says Aronson-Rath. “They are fighting for very different ideas and very different policies but their method through life was so similar. For Trump, his promise is really about looking backward at America and fighting for that. For Kamala Harris it’s about the present to the future.”
Watch the doc’s trailer here.
“The Choice 2024” premieres on PBS and begins streaming on YouTube Tuesday and on Frontline’s website and in the PBS App. The film will also be available to stream on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel.
