Stephen Fry in America - Season 1 (2008)

Erudite British actor and stand-up comedian Stephen Fry starts his idiosyncratic tour of the USA like mainstream immigration and pioneering, on the East Coast, in New York. He tastes both the capital Washington D.C. and the Yankee countryside. He searches for vestiges of the Civil War but also meets Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and similar worldwide-user-run websites.

Stephen visits the US region most appealing to him, traditional Dixieland south of the Mason Dixie line, which he physically finds between Pennsylvania and Virginia. In the Virgianias he visits the coal mines which power half of US electric current. In Kentucky, horse breeding, whiskey distilling and Bluegrass, also the link to Tennessee and an angle to break his British tongue on the Dixie accent. Forensics for real prove gruesome. Trough Smokey Mountains into the Carolinas, for a balloon flight and Southern hospitality in Georgia. South of Dixie to 'Yankee-like' ...

Stephen travels through the basin of Old Man River, North America's greatest, from the Great Lakes to its Gulf of Mexico delta. Stephen starts in Louisiana, visiting New Orleans, site of Mardi Gras frivolity and superstition, touring the ruins of the Lower Ninth Ward and Louisiana's infamous Angola State Penitentiary. He then travels north along Highway 61, with stops in Natchez, Mississippi (talking with Morgan Freeman, owner of a local blues club), Arkansas (canoeing on the river), Iowa (discussing meditation at the Maharishi International University), St. Louis (...