February 8, 2021 12:20 pm
On Saturday, February 13, PBS WORLD will be rebroadcasting Cooked: Survival By Zip Code as part of the ongoing PBS Race in America initiative. Cooked will air across the country on WORLD channels reaching 73% of the country, with 354 airdates on 209 channels. Because WORLD airs in all time zones synchronously, the broadcast will be at 9pm ET, 8pm CT, 7pm MT, and 6pm PT.
In its first year on television, Cooked: Survival by Zip Code was scheduled for 4,854 airdates on 613 channels, breaking the record for the most Independent Lens airdates/channels in one year. Even with two more years of television viewing ahead, the film already ranks among the top dozen Independent Lens films of all time for broadcast frequency and channel reach.
ABOUT THE FILM
In the summer of 1995, Chicago experienced an unthinkable disaster, when extremely high humidity and a layer of heat-retaining pollution drove the heat index up to more than 126 degrees. Cooked: Survival by Zip Code tells the story of this tragic heatwave, the most traumatic in U.S. history, in which 739 citizens died over the course of just a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American.
When peeled away from the shocking headlines the story reveals the less newsworthy but long-term crisis of pernicious poverty, economic, and social isolation and racism. Cooked is a story about life, death, and the politics of crisis in an American city that asks the question: Was this a one-time tragedy, or an appalling trend?