The National Parks: America's Best Idea

The National Parks (six episodes, twelve hours) tells the human history of five of the nation’s most important and most heavily visited National Parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Acadia, and Great Smoky Mountains) and the unforgettable Americans who made them possible. Set against some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth, each park’s story is filled with incidents and characters as gripping and fascinating as American history has to offer. Woven into the series will also be a broader, evolving story of the very idea of National Parks, as uniquely an American concept as jazz, baseball, and the Declaration of Independence as well as the expanding, constantly changing National Parks system (encompassing stories from other parks) and the growing role they all have come to play in our nation's sense of itself, its past, and its future.