What to Stream This Month

Find our previous streaming recommendations here.

Do you ever wish you could binge-watch your favorite PBS programs? If you’re a member you already can; if not, it’s easy to join. With WTTW Passport, members can watch a huge library of PBS and WTTW programming on-demand on any streaming device. To learn more about WTTW Passport, check out our dedicated site. You can activate or sign up for Passport here.

Each month we’ll bring you a few Passport picks.

Mrs. Wilson

This three-part series on Masterpiece tells the stranger-than-fiction story of Alison Wilson, who discovers she wasn’t the only wife of her husband after his death. As she digs into her husband’s life – he was an intelligence agent and a spy novelist, so he was practiced in the art of deception – she uncovers more and more secrets. It’s all based on a true story, and Ruth Wilson, who plays Alison, is Alison’s granddaughter, making the story that much richer.

You can also read our recaps of the series here.

The Central Park Five

This Ken Burns documentary, made with his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon, was released in 2012, but is available again for streaming for a limited time (until October of this year), in the 30^th anniversary year of the incident. It explores the infamous miscarriage of justice in the widely covered case of a white woman who was raped in New York City’s Central Park in 1989. Five black and Latino teenagers were wrongly convicted of the crime in a trial that illuminated the racial discrimination that plagued the media coverage and prosecution.

Finding Your Roots

The fifth season of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s popular Finding Your Roots ended recently, but it’s still available to stream. Watch Gates and his team uncover the ancestry and familial history of celebrities from Ann Curry to Andy Samberg, Marisa Tomei to Marco Rubio, Michael Strahan to Sheryl Sandberg.

NOVA

There are plenty of fascinating episodes of NOVA available to stream, including several that allow you to further explore a topic covered in other shows airing soon! Pluto and Beyond joins the team behind the New Horizons spacecraft, which explored Pluto in 2015 and now travels ever farther into space – the perfect teaser for PBS’s Summer of Space programming, which will celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the lunar landing. Einstein’s Quantum Riddle follows physicists trying to prove aspects of Albert Einstein’s theories, a fitting companion to the upcoming Light Falls, airing May 29 at 10:00 pm, which narrates Einstein’s development of the theory of relativity. Rise of the Rockets looks at new developments in rocket technology and where space exploration may be going, which can give you a grand overview of the past and future of rockets when paired with an episode of Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World on the rocket that airs May 15 at 10:00 pm. Don’t miss the other great NOVA episodes available to stream, too!