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The Worst Episodes of American Experience

Every episode of American Experience ranked from worst to best. Explore the Worst Episodes of American Experience!

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TV's most-watched history series brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today.

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Episode Rankings

  1. #1 Worst Episode
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    American Experience Season 1 Episode 2 - Radio Bikini
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    #1 - Radio Bikini

    S1:E2

    While the U.N. debated strategies for control of atomic energy, the U.S. Navy was preparing two highly-publicized nuclear tests. Seven hundred fifty cameras were shipped to Bikini to be used for a major propaganda film. Bikinians had no say about turning their idyllic island into an atomic test site. Forty years later, their home would still be too contaminated to support human life.

    Director:Robert Stone
    Writer:Unknown

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  2. American Experience Season 1 Episode 3 - Indians, Outlaws and Angie Debo
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    #2 - Indians, Outlaws and Angie Debo

    S1:E3

    As a child in 1899, Angie Debo was taken to Oklahoma in a covered wagon. She would become her state's most controversial historian -- her career threatened when she uncovered a cache of documents which proved a widespread conspiracy to cheat Native Americans out of oil-rich lands.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  3. American Experience Season 1 Episode 4 - Eric Sevareid's Not So Wild A Dream
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    #3 - Eric Sevareid's Not So Wild A Dream

    S1:E4

    A touching memoir beginning with life in a small Minnesota town and taking us through a young man's early days as pacifist. Reporting on the rise of fascism in Europe, Sevareid, as a young CBS reporter, would change his belief. Based on Sevareid's best-selling book of the same title.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  4. American Experience Season 1 Episode 5 - The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter
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    #4 - The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter

    S1:E5

    An original look through newsreels, war department films, posters and interviews with five, real-life "Rosies" about the reality of working in the defense plants during WWII, and their reactions to having to give up those jobs for returning GIs.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  5. American Experience Season 1 Episode 7 - Kennedy vs. Wallace: A Crisis Up Close
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    #5 - Kennedy vs. Wallace: A Crisis Up Close

    S1:E7

    An intimate portrait of the Kennedy brothers and their confrontation with Alabama Governor George Wallace when he defied the courts by refusing to integrate the University in 1963. The film offers unprecedented access to the Oval Office as well as to strategy meetings held by Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  6. American Experience Season 1 Episode 8 - Geronimo and the Apache Resistance
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    #6 - Geronimo and the Apache Resistance

    S1:E8

    The story of a tragic collision of two civilizations, each with startlingly different views of one another. In 1886, 5,000 U.S. troops mobilized to capture this one man and his band of followers, who by refusing to move onto a reservation, defied and eluded federal authorities.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  7. American Experience Season 1 Episode 9 - Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Revisited
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    #7 - Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Revisited

    S1:E9

    An updated look at the Alabama tenant families that Walker Evans and James Agee documented in their 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, an American classic.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  8. American Experience Season 1 Episode 10 - That Rhythm, Those Blues
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    #8 - That Rhythm, Those Blues

    S1:E10

    The evolution of rhythm and blues through the careers of singers Ruth Brown and Charles Brown, from the 1940s into the 50s, with contemporary performances by both.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  9. American Experience Season 1 Episode 11 - The Radio Priest
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    #9 - The Radio Priest

    S1:E11

    Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest from Michigan, uses the new power of radio to become one of the first media stars; every Sunday he would broadcast his message railing against the nation's economic and social system to millions of listeners caught in the grip of the Depression.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  10. American Experience Season 1 Episode 12 - Hearts and Hands
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    #10 - Hearts and Hands

    S1:E12

    The design and art of quilting yields intimate clues about the lives of 19th century women, who stitched their personal and political stories into these artifacts of history.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  11. American Experience Season 1 Episode 13 - Views of a Vanishing Frontier
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    #11 - Views of a Vanishing Frontier

    S1:E13

    The journey of Prince Maximilian, German naturalist, and artist Karl Bodmer, who explored the Mississippi River area from 1832-34, meticulously documenting in paintings and journals the landscape, plants and life of Native Americans.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  12. American Experience Season 1 Episode 14 - Eudora Welty: One Writer's Beginnings
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    #12 - Eudora Welty: One Writer's Beginnings

    S1:E14

    Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Eudora Welty narrates the story of her own Southern childhood and early artistic development in Jackson, Mississippi. Based on her best-selling book of the same title.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  13. American Experience Season 1 Episode 15 - The World That Moses Built
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    #13 - The World That Moses Built

    S1:E15

    From the late 1920s through the 1960s, Robert Moses held almost total power over the landscape of New York. He built bridges, highways, Jones Beach, Lincoln Center and the United Nations, some of the most ambitious public works ever conceived, and some of the most controversial.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  14. American Experience Season 1 Episode 16 - Sins of Our Mothers
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    #14 - Sins of Our Mothers

    S1:E16

    A Gothic tale of sin and redemption in 19th century New England. A small town in Maine reacts to the unconventional behavior of one of its young residents, a woman named Emeline Gurney. A fascinating examination of small town mores.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  15. American Experience Season 2 Episode 1 - The Great Air Race of 1924
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    #15 - The Great Air Race of 1924

    S2:E1

    The first around-the-world air race, sponsored by the Army Air Service to prove that the airplane had a commercial future, was the ultimate test of man and machine. Four pilots took off in single-engine, open-cockpit planes; 175 days later, two remaining pilots would land where they'd begun, in Seattle.

    Director:David Grubin
    Writer:David Grubin

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  16. American Experience Season 2 Episode 2 - Demon Rum
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #16 - Demon Rum

    S2:E2

    Prohibition's effect on Detroit, Michigan, the first major American city to "go dry," where smuggling liquor across the Canadian border became the second largest indusry in town. A humorous, wild tale related by residents who lived through this national experiment which lasted from 1920 to 1933.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  17. American Experience Season 2 Episode 3 - A Family Gathering
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #17 - A Family Gathering

    S2:E3

    Lise Yasui explores three generations of her Japanese-American family - from their immigration to Oregon in the early 1900s through their imprisonment in internment camps during World War Two.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  18. American Experience Season 2 Episode 4 - The Great War: 1918
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    #18 - The Great War: 1918

    S2:E4

    All lingering 19th-century notions of the romance of battle were replaced by the terrible reality of 20th-century mechanized warfare. At Verdun, the French lost 300,000 men; at the Somme, the English lost one million. Against this setting, America reluctantly sent its boys to fight. The wrenching and heroic accounts of U.S. soldiers and nurses who served in the closing battles of the bloodiest war of the century.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  19. American Experience Season 2 Episode 5 - Wildcatter: A Story of Texas Oil
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #19 - Wildcatter: A Story of Texas Oil

    S2:E5

    The tale of mavericks whose risk-taking, sweat and dreams changed an American industry. Starting with Spindletop, the first Texas gusher in 1902, rare archival film and interviews with pioneering oilmen are set against a contemporary story of a modern "wildcatter," gambling to find his fortune in yet another narrow hole in the Texas earth.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  20. American Experience Season 2 Episode 6 - Forever Baseball
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #20 - Forever Baseball

    S2:E6

    There is hardly a city, town or village without a baseball diamond. More than a game, baseball is a tradition, rite of passage, an enduring passion, a code for understanding the culture. A wry, philosophical essay on what makes baseball the great American pastime.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  21. American Experience Season 2 Episode 7 - Mr. Sears' Catalogue
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    #21 - Mr. Sears' Catalogue

    S2:E7

    They started selling watches. Then Richard Sears and Alva Curtis Roebuck started a revolution -- a "wish book" that made life on the farm a little easier and put consumer goods within reach of every American. A story of entrepreneurial triumph as well as an affectionate portrait of America from the 1890s through the 1920s.

    Directors:Kenneth Levis, Edward Gray
    Writers:Kenneth Levis, Mark Obenhaus, Edward Gray

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  22. American Experience Season 2 Episode 8 - Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven
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    #22 - Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven

    S2:E8

    A stunning film portrait of Yosemite National Park. The film's narration is taken from using the 1851 diary of the first expedition of soldiers into the sacred valley home of the Ahwahnechee tribe and introduces today's hikers and campers, to whom Yosemite is a true shrine.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  23. American Experience Season 2 Episode 9 - Adam Clayton Powell
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    #23 - Adam Clayton Powell

    S2:E9

    Affluent, handsome, light-skinned and blond, he could pass for white. But his message about "economics and jobs" would make him one of the most charismatic black leaders in the 20th century. A U.S. Representative for 25 years, he pushed through social legislation, but his relish for money and fast living eventually led him to political ruin.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  24. American Experience Season 2 Episode 10 - Journey to America
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #24 - Journey to America

    S2:E10

    A tribute to the twelve million people who emigrated to the U.S. between 1890 and 1920. A recapturing of the journey through Europe to seaport towns, to the arrival in New York Harbor, and into the early months of settlement from urban ghettos out into the prairies. Letters, diaries and oral interviews are used to depict one of the largest single human migrations in history.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  25. American Experience Season 2 Episode 11 - Ballad of a Mountain Man
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #25 - Ballad of a Mountain Man

    S2:E11

    Bascom Lamar Lunsford was a pioneer folklorist who in the 1920s began a campaign to preserve mountain music and dance. He dignified what was known as "hillbilly music." Knocking on doors of local banjo pickers and fiddlers, listening to their songs, he amassed an extraordinary repertoire, recorded for the Library of Congress and started the first folk music festival.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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Worst Episodes Summary

"Radio Bikini" is the worst rated episode of "American Experience". It scored /10 based on 0 votes. Directed by Robert Stone and written by Unknown, it aired on 10/11/1988. This episode scored 0.0 points lower than the second lowest rated, "Indians, Outlaws and Angie Debo".