“Hope in the Water,” a documentary series that first aired on U.S. public television channel PBS in 2024, has begun production on its second season and will air in three parts in 2027.
The second season of the series, which highlights the work of innovative seafood producers and conservationists in blue food systems, will document the people on the front lines of “one of the most urgent challenges of our time: feeding a planet of over 8 billion people while supporting the freshwater systems and oceans that make life possible,” PBS said in a release.
“Hope in the Water sets out to tell hopeful, solution-driven stories about the future of our oceans and our food. It's evident that these stories resonate, and we’re excited to continue the journey with PBS – exploring even more of the people and ideas helping to shape a more sustainable future,” Executive Advisor David E. Kelley said.
The first season of the series was directly viewed by more than 7 million people, was featured across more than 145 news stories in publications such as The New York Times, People magazine, and The Wall Street Journal, and was nominated for an Emmy Award.
“The series became far more than a three-part documentary. It grew into a national impact campaign around the future of food and the role that responsibly sourced foods from water can play in feeding a growing planet,” Jennifer Bushman, the co-founder and executive director of Fed by Blue, which is the nonprofit behind the series, told SeafoodSource.
Bushman further explained that buy-in has come from PBS itself, with PBS LearningMedia creating a five-part educational toolkit based on the series that has been downloaded by more than 440,000 educators and is available to teachers in more than 90 percent of U.S. schools.
Additionally, retail impact campaigns, which took stories and species featured in the series directly to consumers, resulted in an average sales increase of more than 25 percent for selected responsibly sourced seafood products in participating markets, “demonstrating that storytelling can translate into measurable changes in purchasing behavior,” Bushman said.
The series also became the foundation for “The Blue Food Cookbook,” which was co-written by Andrew Zimmern, a four-time James Beard Award-winning chef whose production company Intuitive Content is involved in the series. The cookbook aimed to build on the series’ storytelling and momentum and reached second place on Amazon’s overall cookbook bestseller list.
Collectively, the series generated more than 2.5 billion media impressions, held more than 60 premieres, screenings, and impact events across the U.S., and aired in more than six countries around the world.
“Those numbers matter because ‘Hope in the Water’ is tackling an enormous question: How do we feed more than 8 billion people while protecting the oceans, rivers, and freshwater systems on which we depend?” Bushman said.
The second season aims to further that momentum and sports a new collection of stories and voices to do so.
"The ambition is not simply to reach a larger audience but to turn that audience into an even broader movement around responsibly sourced foods from water, connecting storytelling with education, chefs, retailers, communities and real-world action,” Bushman said.
