Ted Koppel spends four episodes tracing a single supply chain: the couches made by Ethan Allen, once built in Vermont, now assembled in Chinese factories where workers earn roughly $20 a week for shifts that leave them exhausted. Koppel uses that one company as a thread through a much larger transformation, following China's shift from socialist orthodoxy toward state-managed capitalism, a system that lets citizens chase profit and property while the government still dictates how many children they can have. He crosses between factory floors in China and shuttered plants in the United States, interviewing workers on both sides of a trade relationship that lifted one country's fortunes while gutting the other's manufacturing towns. The series does not settle on a villain; it shows how the same globalization that impoverished American factory workers has pulled millions of Chinese laborers out of rural poverty, even as it enriches a new class of factory owners and officials. The couch factory keeps the argument concrete, letting the numbers and the faces do the explaining instead of narration alone.