Documentary+, a nonfiction streaming service, will premiere “The Price of Milk,” an investigative pop-culture docuseries from XTR and People’s Television, on July 2. All four episodes will be available to stream across all Documentary+ platforms, including free on the Documentary+ streaming network.

Directed by Emmy-nominee Nicholas Bruckman (“Not Going Quietly,” “Minted: The Rise (and Fall?) of the NFT”) and Peabody-Award winner Yoni Brook (“Philly D.A.”), and produced by Jen Maylack, James Doolittle, Bruckman, and Brook, the series had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, where it screened in the NOW program. The series is also executive produced by XTR’s Justin Lacob, Matt Cherchio, and Bryn Mooser.

The film tells the untold story of the iconic ‘90s “Got Milk?” campaign and its impact on farmers, consumers, and public policy. Using interviews and archival footage, it moves from farms to the White House, diving into America’s love/hate relationship with milk, as well as the dairy industry’s grip on pop culture, politics, and food.

The series opens by examining how “Got Milk?” became a pop-culture phenomenon in the 1990s, deploying everyone from Frankie Muniz to Britney Spears, Beyoncé, and SpongeBob Square Pants to generate attention for all things dairy. However, the campaign became a boondoggle that never reversed declining milk consumption. Following the money, the series uncovers a dairy industry working with the U.S. government to fight the tides of America’s changing tastes.

“I grew up mesmerized by these 1990s ads – but behind them is a David vs. Goliath story and a battle for America’s refrigerators. I hope audiences discover there’s so much more to what’s on our plate, and what’s on our screens.” said Bruckman.

“A glass of milk is easy to take for granted, so I’m eager for audiences to meet the people for whom milk is really personal. As a filmmaker, I loved exploring how it’s more than a food, it’s a complicated part of our American identity.” said Brook.

The project has an unusual origin of its own. “The Price of Milk” was financed by Oatly, the global oatmilk company — whose only stipulation was that the series be about milk. The filmmakers retained full creative control and reported the story journalistically; the brand is not mentioned in the series except as a disclosing title card.

Here’s a look at the four episodes:

Episode 1 — Got Milked?: The “Got Milk?” campaign made milk mustaches ubiquitous in the 1990s. But who paid for it? A government-mandated milk slush fund. Husband-and-wife dairy farmers take on the admen and corporate interests behind the campaign.

Episode 2 — Dairy Never Dies: America’s unlikeliest tourist destination is a dairy-farm theme park in Indiana, with live calf births on stage and tens of thousands of cows behind the scenes. Journalists and activists uncover a dark story behind the curtain of the so-called “Dairy Disneyland”.

Episode 3 — Government Cheese: The origin story of the stuffed-crust pizza and the Taco Bell quesalupa begins in a government program inducing Americans to eat more dairy. As money flows to corporations, small dairy farms shut down, and a Wisconsin dairy-farmer-turned-whistleblower takes on “big milk.”

Episode 4 — The Kids Are Not Alright: Milk needs new mouths to survive. Students push back against mandatory milk cartons in the lunchroom, and climate activists call out cow manure’s greenwashing. Will milk lose its hold on kids’ stomachs — and minds?

Read the full article on Variety here.

We’re thrilled to announce that our work has been recognized with three Telly Awards this year!

Our Pack4Good campaign, created in collaboration with Canopy Planet, took home two honors: a Bronze Award for Best AI Commercial and a Silver Award for Best Use of Generative AI. Meanwhile, our American Made video celebrating the launch of Alstom’s Avelia Liberty train for Amtrak earned a Silver Telly for Best Corporate Image.

Seeing these projects recognized in this way means everything to us. Thank you to our incredible collaborators and clients who made it all possible.

There is a moment in The Price of Milk — a docuseries that premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival — where a Pennsylvania dairy farmer named Joe Cochran describes writing a $4,000 check to the federal government so that it could produce the famous “Got Milk?” ads he despised. “I get tired of people reaching their fingers into my wallet and taking money from me and I’m not getting anything back,” he says. “To hell with it.” It is the kind of raw, quietly furious line that no marketing department would ever write. Which is exactly why it works. And which is exactly why Oatly, the Swedish plant-milk brand, paid for the film that contains it.

That paradox — a brand funding journalism that doesn’t mention the brand — is the business Nicholas Bruckman has spent nearly 15 years building.

Bruckman is the founder of People’s Television, an independent film and commercial production studio he runs with business partner Ryder Haske and a team of 15 across offices in New York and Washington, D.C. He has won Audience Awards at Sundance and South by Southwest, earned Emmy nominations, and landed films on Netflix, PBS, and Hulu. But the animating question of his career has never been about prestige. It has been about sustainability — how a filmmaker committed to social justice storytelling can keep the lights on without surrendering the independence that makes the work worth watching.

“You have to create your own paths to be a storyteller,” Bruckman says. “You have to find your own artistic voice, but also your own platform on which to make a sustainable career in storytelling.”

A camera and a cause

He didn’t arrive at that philosophy easily. Growing up in New York City, Bruckman wanted to be Quentin Tarantino or James Cameron. That changed on September 11, 2001, when a 16-year-old Bruckman laced up his rollerblades, skated downtown to the World Trade Center, and filmed what he saw. The tool he’d been treating as entertainment revealed itself as something closer to medicine — a way to build empathy across divides that were, suddenly, visibly catastrophic.

He redirected his lens toward the unseen. Valley of Saints, a narrative feature he produced set in Kashmir, won the Sundance Audience Award. Then came Not Going Quietly, his portrait of disability rights activist Ady Barkan — losing his voice to ALS while becoming the face of the Medicare for All movement — on a final road trip across America. It won both the Audience Award and the Special Jury Prize at SXSW, was released theatrically by Greenwich Entertainment to critical acclaim, and earned multiple Emmy nominations.

But Bruckman discovered that winning prizes doesn’t automatically unlock the next project.

“Just because you have Sundance credentials, the system doesn’t always reward projects that don’t have clear financial ROI,” he says. The independent documentary world was contracting. The industry, as Bruckman puts it plainly, was dying.

So he built something new.

The independence clause

People’s Television operates on a theory most of the media industry has been slow to accept: that brands, foundations, and advocacy organizations are sitting on powerful, untold stories — and that independent filmmakers are the right people to tell them. Not as typical vendors. As artists with editorial independence.

The studio has made branded documentary work for Meta, Airbnb, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Simons Foundation. Two campaigns — Particles of Thought for PBS Nova and Stories of Impact for the Simons Foundation — are 2026 Webby nominees. The model lives or dies on one principle: the filmmakers have to be genuinely empowered to tell the story.

“It’s important that brands and organizations give artists the freedom to do that so the work is received as true filmaking,” Bruckman says. “Otherwise, audiences will see it only as marketing.”

Minted, his documentary about the NFT art market, was funded by the crypto community and sold to Netflix, premiering in over 100 countries. Not Going Quietly was partially funded by Be a Hero, the political nonprofit Barkin led — and still maintained the critical distance that made it credible to skeptical audiences. In both cases, journalistic independence was a condition of production.

What’s really in your milk

The Price of Milk is the purest expression of this model yet. Oatly’s only stipulation was that the film had to be about milk. What Bruckman and co-director Yoni Brook found was stranger than anyone expected. The “Got Milk?” campaign — one of the most beloved ad campaigns in American history — was in fact a mandatory government program, funded by fees extracted from every dairy farmer in the country, administered by Dairy Management Inc., and designed primarily to benefit large industrial agriculture. Small farmers despised it. Some sued all the way to the Supreme Court.

The series also traces how the Checkoff program entrenched milk in public school lunches, despite the fact that the vast majority of African American and Asian American students are lactose intolerant.

“What happens with checkoff dollars is much bigger than milk and bigger than food,” Bruckman said. “It’s about how large corporate forces can kind of co-opt our democratic processes.”

In January, he screened the series on Capitol Hill. Staffers from Senator Cory Booker’s office, Senator Adam Schiff’s team, agricultural policy experts, and Oatly representatives gathered alongside dairy farmers — an unlikely alliance united by a common enemy: the stranglehold of big ag over Congress.

“There’s no way without an independent film vehicle that any of those people would have been brought together,” Bruckman says. “It opens doors for brands to be part of conversations they couldn’t otherwise.”

The baked goods theory of change

The lesson is not a tactical one. It is about what storytelling is for — a question Bruckman has been turning over since he skated downtown with a camera at 16.

He often returns to something the late activist Judy Heumann told him: during the 504 protests in San Francisco, many disability rights activists who couldn’t reach the demonstrations would bake goods and send them to those who could. Great filmmaking, she said, is the baked goods — the emotional currency that organizers need to keep going.

“I’ve carved out this nontraditional path of being a CEO and an artist at the same time,” Bruckman says. “It’s not easy, but each role makes the other possible.”

With The Price of Milk heading to streaming and a narrative adaptation of Ady Barkan’s life in development, along with several upcoming branded and independent documentary projects, People’s Television is betting that audiences, exhausted by algorithmic content and AI noise, are hungry again for stories that cost something to tell. Not a consumer choice. A political one. But it starts with someone willing to pick up a camera and go looking.

Read the full article on Forbes here.