Ariane Brandt

A free Black man from New York is tricked, kidnapped, and sold into slavery in the South, where he endures twelve years of brutal servitude before finding a way to contact his family and secure his freedom.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Union gunboats sailed into Port Royal Sound, on the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia. White plantation owners fled, and the 10,000 blacks who lived there, almost all of whom were slaves, were freed in the first test of President Abraham Lincoln's dream of emancipation. Charlotte Forten, a 21-year-old educated black woman, helped the freed slaves to begin to build a new society. That experience forms the plot of this drama, based on Charlotte Forten's journals, which was telecast on "American Playhouse."

Mild-mannered Chester Gaylord trudges through life with a painful sexual handicap. He goes for a magical colonoscopy where he meets a woman with a microscope who changes his life.

In cases ripped from the headlines, police investigate serious and often deadly crimes, weighing the evidence and questioning the suspects until someone is taken into custody. The district attorney's office then builds a case to convict the perpetrator by proving the person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Working together, these expert teams navigate all sides of the complex criminal justice system to make New York a safer place.

American Playhouse is an anthology television series periodically broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.