Stephen Fry opens by explaining how close he came to being American: his father was offered a job at Princeton just before Fry was born in London, and turned it down. This first episode of a six-part series sends him instead through the country he might have grown up in, riding mostly in a London taxi across New England, down through Washington, D.C., and on to the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania. Along the way he talks to presidential hopefuls campaigning in New Hampshire, hears about the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts, meets nuclear submariners in Connecticut, and stops for lobster fishermen in Maine and ice cream makers in Vermont. New York supplies small-time mobsters, Rhode Island its socialites, New Jersey its card washers. Fry treats each stop as a piece of evidence toward a single question: what actually holds this country together. The route through the autumn foliage is scenic, but the conversations, not the landscape, carry the episode.