Bill Maher To Exec Produce PETA Docuseries ‘The Failed Experiment’

Peter White
·2 min read
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EXCLUSIVE: Bill Maher, an honorary director of PETA, has teamed up with the animal rights organization to produce a documentary about America’s multibillion-dollar experimentation industry.

The host of HBO’s Real Time is exec producing The Failed Experiment, which will launch on Amazon’s Prime Video on January 9.

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It marks Maher’s first new documentary project in a number of years; he was behind the Larry Charles-directed Religulous and exec produced HBO’s Vice.

The six-part series pulls back the curtain on the experimentation industry and explores why there are so few cures and effective treatments for the deadliest diseases—including Alzheimer’s, many forms of cancer, Parkinson’s, and ALS as well as offering solutions for modernizing the world of research.

Each episode reveals how the country’s heavy reliance on outdated experiments on animals is causing the U.S. to lose its place as the world leader in research and technological advancements. Featuring interviews with scientists, experts from PETA, a Harvard University physician, and a former primate experimenter, the series breaks down the wastefulness of the National Institutes of Health’s $45 billion annual budget – taxpayer money that’s used to treat animals in laboratories like pincushions and test tubes as people die without cures for illnesses while modern, human-relevant, animal-free testing methods are readily available. It also shines a spotlight on the failures of animal experimentation and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of animals in laboratories.

The series is directed by Ethan Eliam.

“We’ve all lost loved ones to diseases, but did you ever wonder why there are so few cures?” said Maher. “The Failed Experiment dismantles America’s archaic research program and exposes the bias that is preventing progress.”

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