The Apple Family Plays: Scenes From American Life (PBS)

Beginning in 2010, Tony Award winner Richard Nelson premiered a new play each year at The Public Theater about the fictional, liberal Apple family of Rhinebeck, New York. These plays about family, politics, change, and the way we live today burst with remarkable immediacy. Each of The Apple Family Plays originally premiered on the night on which it is set. In That Hopey Changey Thing, the Apples reflect on the state of their family and discuss memory, manners and politics as polls close on mid-term election night on November 2, 2010 and a groundswell of conservative sentiment flips Congress on its head. In Sweet and Sad, on November 11, 2011, a family brunch stirs up discussions of loss, remembrance and a decade of change. Sorry, which premiered on November 6, 2012, finds the Apples sorting through family anxieties and confusion on the day of electing the President. The series finally concluded on November 23, 2013 with Regular Singing, which premiered on the 50th Anniversary of JFK’s assassination that shocked the world.

The plays were filmed by PBS and aired nationally beginning in October, 2014.