will premiere its new Original Series, Craig Ferguson: American On Purpose, on Saturday, May 30, at 9 p.m. ET/PT, launching a five-episode run that will air weekly and stream the next day for subscribers.
Craig Ferguson fronts the series, which is timed to America’s 250th anniversary and sets out to examine what it means to be American through humor, history and personal reflection. Across the episodes, Ferguson travels coast to coast to look at the country’s founding ideals and contradictions while also reflecting on his own path to becoming a U.S. citizen.
The series will take on the First Amendment, individualism, patriotism, capitalism and the immigrant experience of becoming American. It will also bring Ferguson face to face with Jay Leno, Jason Biggs, Tiffany Haddish, Daymond John, Vivian Tu, KT Tunstall, Salman Rushdie and a World War II veteran who stormed Omaha Beach.
The project comes from The Intellectual Property Corporation, part of Sony Pictures Television. Amy Entelis said the 250th anniversary of the United States offers a rare opportunity to reflect on who Americans are and how they got here, adding that Ferguson approaches the subject with humor and insight while exploring how the country’s core ideas keep evolving in real time.
Ferguson has described American identity as something open to debate, saying what being American means has always been up for discussion and that one person’s idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not necessarily another’s. He has also said being American is like stretchy knitwear: it looks different on everybody.
That framing is the point of the series. Rather than treating the anniversary as a ceremonial date, the show uses it as a reason to test the stories Americans tell about themselves, and to let Ferguson’s own experience as an immigrant sit alongside the people, arguments and contradictions he finds on the road.
The first episode arrives May 30, and the next day viewers can stream it on.com/watch and on the app for streaming subscribers. From there, the question the series answers is not whether the country has one fixed identity, but how a nation built on argument, reinvention and arrival keeps remaking the answer.