Prohibition (Season 1)

Prohibition (2011) is a three-part documentary miniseries you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick for PBS. It follows the full story of the Eighteenth Amendment — from the temperance campaigns that took nearly a century to push through a nationwide alcohol ban, through thirteen years of Volstead Act enforcement, to the repeal that finally acknowledged what most citizens had already figured out.

Burns and Novick assembled the series from archival photographs, period newsreel footage, and readings drawn from letters, trial transcripts, and memoirs. The voice cast features Tom Hanks, Jeremy Irons, Samuel L. Jackson, Paul Giamatti, and John Lithgow, among others; historian Daniel Okrent appears on camera throughout as the series' analytical guide.

What Prohibition demonstrated was that banning a habit does not end it — it relocates it and hands the profit to whoever is willing to break the law. Organised crime in America was one beneficiary; public cynicism was another. Burns and Novick let that contradiction carry the argument. Stream Prohibition (2011) online on iFILM.