David McCourt is clear about what he wanted Amerigo—the documentary set to air on PBS in June 2026—to be, and just as precise about what he did not want it to be.
McCourt, an Emmy Award–winning producer whose career spans educational television, documentary filmmaking, and global telecommunications, is best known as a producer of Reading Rainbow, the beloved PBS children’s series that won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Children’s Series in 2005.
Across his work, McCourt has long framed media as a tool for listening and civic reflection. His latest PBS documentary, Amerigo, directed by Adam Mason, extends that ethos outward—assembling conversations over two years and across all 50 states to ask what remains of the American Dream as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary.
“Usually when people promote a film or a book,” he told me, “they go on a speaking tour. They try to tell you what they know. I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to learn what I don’t know, not repeat what I already know. Because feelings aren’t negotiable. If people are feeling like something is broken, then we have to understand what that means.”
That refusal to perform expertise rather than practice inquiry shapes Amerigo as something closer to an archive than an argument. McCourt and his team interviewed more than a thousand people across all fifty states—workers, caregivers, artists, educators, small-business owners, public servants, and others navigating the pressures of everyday life—many of them encountered informally rather than recruited through institutions. The film moves between these conversations, McCourt’s family history, archival imagery, and music, assembling a portrait of a country struggling to recognize itself.
Listening as Method
For McCourt, listening is not a soft posture or a waiting room for solutions. It is an ethical practice defined by restraint: a refusal to dilute what people are saying, and a refusal to sprint toward fixes before reckoning with the conditions that made the crisis possible.
Amerigo unfolds through a wide range of voices, many encountered by chance rather than design. Some appear only briefly; others recur as touchstones across the film. McCourt himself moves in and out of the frame—not as an expert narrator, but as a guide shaped by his own family history, particularly the story of his grandfather, a janitor who owned his home, died debt-free, and raised a family on a single income.
“Feelings aren’t negotiable,” McCourt said. “If people feel like something is broken, then something is broken—even if we don’t yet agree on why.”
Listening, in this frame, is not neutral. It either redistributes authority or quietly reaffirms who already holds it.
What Amerigo does not yet resolve is what happens when listening is met not with transformation but with continuity. Institutions shaped by unaccountable power have a long history of absorbing critique without altering their underlying structures, reproducing inequality regardless of intent.
What McCourt Heard
McCourt resists the language of inevitability. The conditions documented in Amerigo, he insists, are not natural outcomes but the result of choices—particularly the choice to prioritize short-term extraction over long-term responsibility.
“We’ve gotten way more individual and way less community-oriented,” he said. “We’ve convinced ourselves that as long as the shareholders are taken care of, everything else will somehow work out. But you can’t exploit the customer, exploit the worker, and ignore the community and expect it to turn out well.”
Across the film, interviewees describe a nation that feels increasingly less collective and more exclusionary. Housing is unaffordable. Wages stagnate. Mental health crises proliferate. Addiction and homelessness are framed as individual failures rather than social symptoms. McCourt is blunt about the stakes.
“We’re taking our strongest asset—all these young people—and we’re not letting them be their best,” he said. “That’s not just tragic. It’s expensive. And it’s avoidable.”
Ethics of wealth and responsibility
Listening takes on different stakes depending on who is doing it—and who can afford not to be affected by what is heard. That tension shaped my approach to this conversation.
I came to it with hesitation. As a scholar of archives, performance, and public memory—and as a single mother navigating academic precarity—I am wary of national conversations about hope articulated by those least threatened by its absence. What mattered here was that McCourt did not deny the tension of his position.
“A lot of wealth—any wealth—involves luck,” he told me plainly. “People like to think it’s all because they worked ten hours a day, but a lot of people work ten hours a day. There’s luck involved.”
McCourt resists exaggerated claims about his net worth, but he does not deny his advantage. What matters to him, he insists, is not wealth itself but how power is exercised. He pointed to examples from his business practices in rural Ireland, where his company supports small-scale job creation through technology.
“We don’t just give a grant,” he explained. “We go out and talk to the person. We tell them we think their idea is a good idea. That confidence matters. It gives them hope.” He paused, then added with a note of irony: “And the funny thing is, our business is making more money than we thought it would. We’re above budget. Maybe my grandfather was right when he told me, ‘Every dollar you give away, you’ll get five back.’”
McCourt’s emphasis on responsibility is sincere, and it gives Amerigo much of its moral force. But it also reveals a quiet fragility in the film’s framework. Ethical appeals depend on those with power choosing restraint over extraction—not because they are compelled to, but because they believe they should. What Amerigo does not attempt to resolve is what happens when power listens carefully, understands clearly, and chooses not to change.
Benchmarks, Legibility, and Representation
That tension between moral benchmarks and narrative legibility comes into sharp focus in Amerigo’s repeated recourse to janitors as a measure of economic possibility. McCourt returns repeatedly to the story of his grandfather—both in the film and in his own framing of its stakes. A janitor who owned his home, died debt-free, and raised a family on a single income, he functions less as a symbol than as a material benchmark.
“Those are facts,” McCourt said. “He was a janitor. He owned his own home. He raised my mother. And if that’s not possible today, we should admit it instead of pretending it’s someone else’s fault.”
The insistence matters. But it also exposes a central tension in the film’s framing. The American Dream is examined primarily through loss—what no longer works—rather than through those who were never fully included in it to begin with. Listening, here, risks becoming a form of recognition that stops short of reordering power: acknowledging harm without altering the structures that determine whose stories shape the frame, and whose remain contextual.
That risk becomes clearer when the film returns to janitors as a moral and economic reference point. McCourt asks whether someone doing that work can still buy a home, still participate in the American Dream. When I pressed him on whether janitors appear in the film as identifiable voices, he pointed to several participants working multiple janitorial jobs, some holding two full-time positions across hotel chains. Their labor is present, he explained, even when their titles are not foregrounded.
The distinction matters. Presence without legibility shapes how listening is received. Without being named, janitors risk functioning less as narrators of economic reality than as symbols through which broader anxieties are voiced. What emerges is not bad faith, but a gap between intention and reception—one that quietly reinforces the film’s larger tension between ethical listening and narrative control.
What the Name Carries
The title Amerigo signals more than a poetic variation on the nation’s name. It gestures toward the act of naming itself—and toward the stories that naming both reveals and conceals.
Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian navigator and cartographer, is remembered less for discovery than for naming. He argued that the lands Europeans had reached were not the edge of Asia, but something else entirely—Mundus Novus, a “New World.”
In McCourt’s framing, Amerigo becomes less about discovery than about survival. The country that emerges is one that has endured genocide, slavery, and civil war—an idea explored in the documentary at length through the reflections of artist–scholar Paul Baldwin, a prize-winning poet. These survivals are not framed as triumphs, but as moral reckonings—endurance that carries cost as much as continuity.
That reckoning surfaces most clearly in the film’s invocation of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. First associated with abolitionist John Brown, later rewritten by Julia Ward Howe as a condemnation of slavery, the hymn becomes less a declaration of righteousness than a record of struggle—rewritten again and again to meet the urgencies of the moment.
Who Gets to Be Central
That question becomes unavoidable in Amerigo’s engagement with Indigenous perspectives.
“You can’t in ninety minutes make everything central,” McCourt said. “But I insisted on us adding it. It mattered to complicate the idea of America’s birthday.”
McCourt described interviewing Indigenous scholars, speaking with members of four different tribes, and sitting in on Indigenous studies courses in an effort to avoid superficial inclusion.
“America’s celebrating its 250th birthday,” he said, “but there were people living here for thousands of years before that. So whose birthday are we celebrating, and whose are we ignoring?”
Still, Indigenous dispossession appears alongside other national pressures—gun violence, addiction, misinformation, declining unions, private equity—treated as interconnected rather than constitutive. The film listens carefully, but it does not fully dwell on what it means to position dispossession as contextual rather than foundational, a choice that reflects the limits of what listening can accomplish without reordering narrative centrality.
Songs of Moral Urgency
Music provides one of Amerigo’s most affective through-lines, particularly in its closing sequence, which brings together multiple reinterpretations of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The song functions not as a unifying anthem, but as a vessel—one that has carried different moral urgencies across time.
“It’s been rewritten over and over—for abolition, for labor movements, for religious reflection,” McCourt said. “It’s always been a song to motivate people around a cause.”
Rather than prescribing a single meaning, McCourt invited musicians to reshape the hymn freely. “Add lyrics, take religion out, put religion back in—it wasn’t for me to say,” he explained. “The song has carried a lot of meanings. It can carry new ones.”
Layered over these performances are excerpts from speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., a choice McCourt described as both historical and personal. “He quoted that song often,” McCourt noted. “And his last publicly recorded words referenced it.” For McCourt, King represents a model of moral urgency without violence—proof that radical critique need not rely on brutality to be transformative. “He was a peaceful revolutionary,” McCourt said. “You could be radical without being brutal.”
Together, the music and King’s words frame moral urgency as a collective undertaking—sustained, reiterated, and renewed through shared cultural labor rather than vested in any single authority.
It is here that a quieter tension comes into focus. When asked about compensation, McCourt acknowledged that the musicians who contributed reinterpretations of the hymn, as well as many interview participants, were not paid beyond limited expense reimbursement. Their labor was framed as voluntary, part of a collective civic effort.
While consistent with Amerigo’s ethos, the choice also reflects a broader cultural pattern in which creative labor is routinely asked to stand in for compensation. When ethical capitalism depends on goodwill rather than structural norms of payment, it risks reproducing the very inequities it seeks to critique—even as it calls for moral renewal.
The Work After Listening
McCourt does not claim Amerigo offers solutions. He frames the film as a beginning, not a blueprint. Again and again, he returns to the necessity of long-term thinking, explicitly invoking Indigenous governance traditions as a corrective to short-term political and economic logic.
“Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington studied the Great Law of Peace,” he said. “But they left out three critical parts: women’s political power, collective decision-making, and seven-generation responsibility.” He paused. “Maybe we can still bring back at least that last part.”
That may be where Amerigo is strongest—and where its limits are most visible. The film listens carefully. It assembles voices with sincerity. It resists the urge to individualize systemic harm. What it leaves unresolved is whether listening alone—without surrendering narrative control, without redistributing authorship—can move beyond recognition into repair.
I do not always agree with McCourt. But I admire the seriousness of his effort and his willingness to sit with contradiction. Amerigo does not resolve the crises it documents. Instead, it insists that before anything can change, we must first be willing to hear what has already been said—and to reckon, together, with what listening obligates us to do next.
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