August 07, 2026
Bucks County, USA/YouTube
'Bucks County, USA,' a new five-part docuseries about recent years of political division in Bucks County, premieres Sept. 20 on PBS. The project is directed by award-winning filmmakers Barry Levinson and Robert May.
The political divisions of Bucks County will be featured in an upcoming PBS docuseries that premieres in September, putting a microscope on how community tensions in the Philly suburbs reflect the national political landscape.
Directed by award-winning filmmakers Barry Levinson and Robert May, the five-episode series follows the story of two 14-year-old girls, Evi and Vanessa, who attend middle school in the Central Bucks School District. The project traces the heightening of political division during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the girls maintain their friendship despite ideological differences between their parents.
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The first trailer for the docuseries was released Thursday. The first two episodes premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will air on local PBS stations on Sept. 20. They also will be available to stream that day on the PBS website and PBS app.
Bucks County is arguably the most purple voting block in the perennial battleground state of Pennsylvania. In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump took Bucks County with a razor-thin margin of 291 votes over Kamala Harris. Four years earlier, Joe Biden defeated Trump by a margin of 17,325 votes. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Trump by 2,699 votes.
Trump's 2024 victory in Bucks County marked Republicans' first win in a presidential election there since 1988. Only once since then has the margin of victory been greater than 5%, when former President Barack Obama defeated John McCain by a margin of 8.63% in 2008.
The docuseries focuses on the escalation of animosity during the pandemic, when lockdown restrictions at schools pitted factions of parents against each other along political lines. The conflict intensified across a spectrum of issues, including LGBTQ+ rights, book banning and broader battles about school curricula.
The series was filmed over a four-year period starting in 2020. Many of the interviews spotlight the voices of students caught in the crossfire of their parents' political strife.
"They're using children for their own gain and in the process they are hurting children," one of the teens says in the trailer.
Tensions have remained high since the project wrapped, including a battle over former Bucks County Sheriff Fred Harran's collaboration agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Harran, a Republican, was defeated by Democrat Danny Ceisler in last year's sherriff's race. Ceisler withdrew the county from the ICE agreement in January, prohibiting sheriff's deputies from inquiring about the immigration status of crime victims, witnesses and court observers.
In the Bucks County District Attorney's Office, Democrat Joe Khan defeated incumbent Republican Jennifer Schorn last year. Khan became the first Democrat to lead the DA's office in more than a century, apart from a DA who won on a Democratic ticket in 1965 after losing the GOP primary that year.
Bucks County also has one of the nation's most closely watched congressional races in November's midterms, when five-term Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick will face Democratic Commissioner Bob Harvie.
Levinson directed the Oscar-winning 1988 drama "Rain Man," the baseball drama "The Natural" and the semi-autobiographical comedy "Diner." His documentary projects include "PoliWood," an examination of the connection between celebrity culture and presidential politics, and the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary "The Band That Wouldn't Die."
May's past films include the 2013 documentary "Kids for Cash," about a Pennsylvania judge who received kickbacks for sentencing minors to for-profit detention centers, and 2021's treasure-hunting documentary "Lust for Gold: A Race Against Time."
In a January interview with the Wrap, May said the goal of the new docuseries was to capture the humanity of people driven to conflict by their political beliefs.
"It has to be genuine, you know?" May said. "And I really care about these people that we've been talking with, every one of them. And they stay in constant contact with us now, because they feel like they've developed this bond with us of trust. And they've seen the piece, and they felt that we didn't twist their words, we didn't do any gotcha moments, just like we said we wouldn't. Everything was in context."
