Each presidential election since 1988, PBSs Frontline has produced The Choice, an in-depth bio-documentary on the two major-party nominees governors, senators, vice presidents, incumbents. (The 1992 edition did not include the businessman and independent candidate Ross Perot.)
This year, the choice is different. And therefore The Choice is different.
The change is clear in the opening minutes, where the most striking quote comes not from a presidential historian but from Omarosa Manigault, once a contestant on The Apprentice, now director of African-American outreach for Donald J. Trump.
The Choice 2016, which makes its debut Tuesday on PBS, begins at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. President Obama, just after releasing his long-form birth certificate, conducts an extended roast of Donald J. Trump, the businessman and reality-TV host who loudly peddled the lie that the president was not born in the United States.
We see Mr. Trump sit, rigid-faced, fuming. The Choice suggests that his decision to run for president may have been born in that room.
Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump, Ms. Manigault says. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.
The documentary, directed by Michael Kirk and written by him and Mike Wiser, pingpongs between the two candidates narratives. The half devoted to Hillary Clinton is more familiar, and not just because her husband was profiled in two past installments.
Weve seen presidential trajectories similar to hers before. Born Hillary Rodham and raised in suburban Park Ridge, Ill., she got her first taste of political fame with an idealistic commencement speech at Wellesley College that won her a profile in Life magazine. She went to law school and had a prominent, controversial career in public affairs.
A key difference, of course, was that she was a woman. In sixth grade, her classmate Ernest Ricketts recalls, she was so bright that her fellow students predicted she would marry a senator. When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, she was politically pressured into taking Mr. Clintons surname, and with it the conviction that she could never entirely be herself in public.
This years The Choice has to tell the stories of two candidates who have been media fixtures for decades. Theres little surprising, for instance, in the section on President Clintons sex scandals, which falls back on the familiar conclusion that a marriage is a mystery to anyone outside it.
The documentary does find memorable moments in the candidates childhoods. Mrs. Clintons father, Hugh Rodham, is described as a hard man who belittled her accomplishments and verbally abused her mother. She didnt like to bring friends home. The Choice argues that this upbringing along with the scrutiny of the White House years contributed to a self-defeating secrecy and defensiveness.
