Art critic Robert Hughes writes and narrates this eight-part survey of American art, tracing how painting, architecture, and design reflect the country's shifting sense of itself from the colonial era through the twentieth century. Hughes moves from Puritan meetinghouses and the raw landscapes painted by the Hudson River School to the industrial confidence of the Gilded Age, the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York, and the rupture of Abstract Expressionism in postwar Manhattan. He stands in front of the actual paintings and buildings he discusses, from Thomas Cole's wilderness scenes to Jackson Pollock's drip canvases, using them as evidence for his argument rather than illustration. His narration is opinionated and often blunt, willing to call out artists and movements he finds overrated as readily as he praises others. The series treats art history as a way of reading American character itself: its restlessness, its religious inheritance, its relationship to money and land. Each episode covers a distinct period, building toward a full account of two centuries of American visual culture.