“It may not be Mister Right YouTube, but it is Mister Right Now.” — Erika Dilday
On Super Bowl Sunday — with America radically divided over the meaning of its 250th anniversary — Erika Dilday came on the show to discuss the power of documentary film to tell the truth about the United States. As executive producer of PBS’ POV (point of view), the longest-running documentary program on American television (now entering its 39th season), Dilday has spent her career championing first-person storytelling. She’s also co-directing an upcoming series with Ken Burns, Emancipation to Exodus, exploring the period from the Civil War to the Great Migration. We discuss why algorithms limit discovery, whether AI can replicate human nuance in documentary movies, and what she learned from screening films at San Quentin. And she tells us her Super Bowl POV which, coming from a Bostonian, should be no surprise.
