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The insightful Our Towns premieres April 13 on HBO and HBO Max

The documentary follows up on the successful book and lectures by James and Deborah Fallows

It’s extremely easy to get upset these days. It’s harder — much harder — to slow down and think and take a look from a higher level while also seeing what things are truly like from the ground. But that’s exactly what authors James and Deborah Fallows did with their bestseller Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America.

It all started in 2011 with a column for The Atlantic asking readers to share stories about their hometowns. And for the next five years, the Fallowses flew from town to town (he’s a private pilot) to experience those stories for themselves. Thus the book was born. That book also paved the way for a lecture series (I caught the couple when they gave their talk here in Pensacola, Fla., in 2018), and now it’s become an HBO documentary — Our Towns — which premieres on April 13.

Deborah and James Fallows appeared at the 2020 RMWF to share their incredible, life-changing five-year journey flying their single-engine propeller plane throughout the United States. In a time when many of us feel exhausted by the negative, divisive rhetoric about the American people, the Fallows highlight uplifting and encouraging stories from people who believe America’s best days are still ahead.

For five years, James and Deborah Fallows traveled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems — from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge — but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallows describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.