Here are all of the 2013 Peabody Awards winners, with links to where you can find access to each program or website. In some cases, viewing streaming content online may not be available based on your location. Note that availability of streaming content changes over time, and at times not all programs will be available.
180 Days
Description: Chronicling a year at Washington Metropolitan, aka DC Met, it is an intimate, unvarnished portrait of a high-poverty high school and the challenges facing students, teachers and administrators.
The African Americans
Description: A long time coming, not to mention five years in the making, Gates’ history of African Americans, their trials, their triumphs and their ongoing influence on this nation, reaches back five centuries to find stories that inspire, unsettle, surprise and illuminate.
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
Description: Whether Bourdain’s tireless search for new taste experiences takes him to Myanmar or Detroit, he never fails to find great stories to go with the food.
Best Kept Secret
Description: The “secret” at Newark’s poor John F. Kennedy High School is its unexpectedly resourceful program for special-needs students, especially autistic teens. This documentary – frank, poignant, never simplistic – immerses viewers in the struggles of three autistic kids and one dedicated teacher.
Borgen
Description: Borgen is a Danish colloquialism for “government,” and this realistic, richly nuanced dramatic series is peerless in its depiction of how the machinery works. It’s also rumination on power, ambition, integrity, love and deal-making, with one of the most intriguing female protagonists in all the TV world.
Where to watch: Link
Boston Bomb Coverage (WBZ & Newsradio 1030)
Description: Out in force to cover the annual marathon, both WBZ-TV and Newsradio 1030 had a journalistic advantage when the bombs detonated. Neither gave it up as their reporters spent hour after hour on the air providing wide-ranging, enterprising, non-sensational coverage of the casualties, the suspects and the intense, nerve-wracking manhunt. They become crucial sources not just to their city but to a stunned nation.
Breaking Bad
Description: Through a stunning brand of visual storytelling and meticulous character development, we were able to explore the darkest chambers of a human heart in a way never before seen on TV. Over five seasons, Vince Gilligan made good on his promise to utterly transform Walter White from Mr. Chips into Scarface.
The Bridge
Description: A crime drama set in motion by a murder victim left literally on the border of West Texas and Northern Mexico, its rare, non-stereotypical depiction of two cultures rubbing against and informing each other is as fascinating as the mystery.
Broadchurch
Description: A peaceful, picturesque seaside town in England is rattled to its core by the murder of a young boy in this intricately crafted, emotionally rich, endlessly surprising mystery series.
Burka Avenger
Description: Smart, colorful and provocative, this Pakistani-produced television program about a super-heroine sends a clear message about female empowerment that has the potential to affect an entire generation.
The Central Park Five
Description: A tragic story, finally told in full, The Central Park Five reexamines not only the case of black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were railroaded and wrongly imprisoned for a rape but the climate of fear and the media frenzy that surrounded their trial.
A Chef’s Life
Description: A cooking/reality series revolving around a high-end, farm-to-fork restaurant in eastern North Carolina’s low country, it’s made all the more appetizing by generous sides of local color, stereotype-defying rural neighbors and Southern food-lore.
GMA Coverage Yolanda
Description: Facing logistical challenges and sharing in the national shock in the face of what may have been the most powerful typhoon is history, GMA news teams provided desperately needed spot news coverage and information, gaining strength and perspective as they worked, and followed up with solid reporting on the aftermath, heroic acts and relief efforts.
Where to watch: Link
Fault Lines: Haiti in a Time of Cholera
Description: Nearly 8,000 Haitians have died of cholera since the island was devastated by an earthquake in 2010, and more than half a million others have been infected. Fault Lines presses for accountability as it reports mounting scientific evidence that U.N. peacekeepers were the source of the epidemic.
Fault Lines: Made in Bangladesh
Description: Probing a garment-factory fire in Bangladesh that left at least 119 people dead, Fault Lines discovered evidence that U.S. retailers such as Walmart, whose Faded Glory clothing brand was found in the ashes, often turn a “blind eye” to their subcontractors’ dangerous, cost-cutting practices.
FRONTLINE: League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis
Description: Undeterred by the National Football League’s defense, FRONTLINE’s investigative team produced a solidly-sourced, high-impact documentary about the extent of brain damage among players, a story still reverberating throughout the world of sports.
Great Performances: Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy
Description: Historically fascinating and grandly entertaining, it’s a tune-filled dissertation on the incalculable influence of Jewish composers – from Irving Berlin to Stephen Sondheim to Stephen Schwartz – and Jewish musical idioms on the evolution of a great American art form.
Hanford’s Dirty Secrets
Description: Centering on a leaking nuclear-waste storage tank in Washington state, the Seattle station’s expose of mismanagement, deception and waste of tax dollars resulted in a full review of the Hanford nuclear “reservation” by the U.S. Department of Energy and resignations at the company that manages the toxic site.
Where to watch: Link
Harper High School
Description: A trio of This American Life reporters embedded themselves for five month at Harper, a Chicago high school where gun violence was epidemic, and produced a pair of hour-long documentaries that were vivid, unblinking, poignant, and sometimes gut-wrenching.
Hollow
Description: Experiential aurally and visually, the interactive website lets visitors immerse themselves in the lives of 30 residents of McDowell County, West Virginia, an economically stressed, shrinking American community both unique and emblematic.
Where to watch: Link
House of Cards
Description: By releasing an entire season of episodes at once, Netflix took binge viewing to a new level and obliterated the idea that a hit TV show needs a slot in prime time. We are able to follow Frank Underwood’s political schemes at our own pace and immerse ourselves in the show’s version of Washington, D.C., where desperation for power is the capital city’s lifeblood.
In Plain Sight: Poverty In America
Description: Many faces and forms of poverty, some predictable, some startling, are highlighted in NBC News’ wide-ranging, multi-platform project, geared to the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of “war” on the scourge.
How To Survive a Plague
Description: A real-life medical thriller, David France’s documentary evokes the alarm and enterprise surrounding AIDS in the late 1980s, when the activists in groups such as ACT UP and TAG took their fates into their own hands and changed the course of a global pandemic.
The House I live In
Description: Forty years and 45 million arrests after the U.S. declared war on them, illegal drugs are cheaper, purer and more available than ever. What went wrong with the campaign? The House I Live In counts the ways, not just with hard statistics but with powerful human stories.
The Invisible War
Description: With powerful interviews with rape survivors at its core, The Invisible War is the most exhaustive report to date on the extent and causes of sexual assault in the U.S. military.
Inside Syria’s War
Description: From gruesome mass-murder scenes outside Homs to displaced children living in caves, the consistent, up-close coverage of Syria’s civil war and its human toll by BBC World News journalists had no equal in 2013.
Key & Peele
Description: It’s like Abbott and Costello Meet Richard Pryor when the duo of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele fearlessly apply their mischievous minds and satirical savvy to racially aware sketches both broad and incisive.
Latino Americans
Description: A revelation no doubt for many viewers, the documentary series’ six fascinating installments traced a people’s history that’s older than the United States itself and showed how Latinos, rendered to foreigners in a land their ancestors colonized, are now reshaping it.
The Law in these Parts
Description: The seemingly lighthearted title notwithstanding, Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s documentary is serious, resoundingly significant work—a long, hard look at the legal system his homeland created in 1967 to govern the newly occupied Palestinian territories and what it has meant and still means to both sides in this lasting conflict.
Life According to Sam
Description: Sam Berns, a teenager bearing up to the ravages of a disease that causes accelerated aging with amazing grace, humor and thoughtfulness, is the subject of this great, informative, humane and humbling documentary.
Louisiana Purchased
Description: Plenty big, never easy, this extensive joint TV-newspaper investigation of Louisiana campaign financing – who gives and gets what – put influence peddlers and buyers on notice and provided TV-news operations around the country a template for ambitious digging.
Where to read: Link
Mea Maxima Culpa
Description: Harrowing and infuriating, Alex Gibney’s investigative documentary focuses on one of the earliest and ugliest cases in the Roman Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal: a Milwaukee priest who abused more than 200 deaf children at a school he oversaw.
A Needed Response
Description: Short, simple and spot-on in its critique of rape culture, the ingenious PSA by two University of Oregon students takes just 25 seconds to make its point that real men treat women with respect.
Questions of Influence
Description: In a series of reports capped by an hour-long prime-time special, WTVF’s investigators revealed that running Tennessee state government “like a business,” as the governor had publicly pledged, in reality meant sweetheart deals, no-bid contracts and ethical lapses. A scathing state audit was just one of the results.
Where to watch: Link
One-on-one with Assad
Description: In what was surely the biggest journalistic “get” of 2013, CBS This Morning’s Charlie Rose sat down with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Under Rose’s polite but persistent questioning, Assad gave us a look into the mind of one of the world’s most vicious warmongers, a glimpse of banality and evil.
Orange Is the New Black
Description: Orange Is the New Black turns a notorious drive-in genre – women behind bars – into a complex, riveting character study rich in insights about femininity, race, power, and the politics, inside and outside prison walls, of mass incarceration.
Orphan Black
Description: It’s all about cloning, but Orphan Black is one of a kind – a super-charged, stylized sci-fi action serial that ponders identity, humanity, bioethics and genetic research when it occasionally stops for breath. Tatiana Maslany is a marvel in the title role.
Outside the Lines
Description: Its close business association with the professional football notwithstanding, ESPN produced a tough, wide-reaching documentary on the concussion crisis in the National Football League and its efforts to downplay growing bodies of scientific evidence and brain-injured player complaints.
The Race Card Project
Description: Undercutting the term’s political, pejorative meaning, Michelle Norris’ website project and NPR series defines “race card” literally, inviting listeners to share six-word summations of their racial ideas and experiences that became the basis of compelling reports about race, pride, prejudice and identity.
Where to interact: Link
The Va’s Opiate Overload
Description: Reveal exposed a staggering upswing – 270 percent over a dozen years – in opiate prescriptions at Veterans Administration hospitals, which has led to an overdose rate among VA patients more than twice the national average.
Where to listen: Link
The Returned
Description: Thoughtfully conceptualized, exquisitely photographed and sensitively acted, this supernatural drama explores loss, grief, memory, guilt and our notions of afterlife as deceased residents of a picturesque mountain town in France seemingly return. It’s elegant, it’s zombie-free and it’s still unnerving.
Scandal
Description: Loosely based on the exploits of a real Washington, D.C. “fixer,” turbocharged by Kerry Washington’s star turn, Scandal is part West Wing and part Dynasty, an exaggerated, outrageous, fun-house reflection of the real-life political shenanigans we’ve come to loathe and jeer.
A Short History of the High Rise
Description: With text, games, antique photos and three storybook-style animated shorts – Mud, Concrete and Glass – the interactive website entertainingly explores 2,500 years of “vertical living.” A fourth feature, Home, catalogues images of multi-story life submitted by the public.
Six by Sondheim
Description: The “father” of the modern Broadway musical bares some of his art and soul in the engrossing, entertaining documentary. It combines his candid reflections, archival footage and fresh interpretations of six of his iconic songs, including “Send in the Clowns.”
The Story of Film
Description: Turner Classics’ monumental project combined 15 installments of Mark Cousins’ gorgeously constructed and richly layered historical tour of world cinema, The Story of Film: An Odyssey, with full showings of 119 of the movies it covers.
Tom Brokaw: Personal Award
Description: A personal Peabody is given to Tom Brokaw, the longtime reporter and anchor of NBC Nightly News. With his TV projects and celebrated books like The Greatest Generation, the anchor emeritus has only enhanced his reputation since he left the desk in 2004.
Read more: Link