Ted Bourne has produced over 200 hours of television, has screened his work at the Sundance Film Festival and has been nominated for multiple awards, including for the International Documentary Association and the Television Critics Association. He gravitates towards verite documentary projects that allow him to immerse the viewer in an unfolding, dramatic story.  

Bourne got his start in film at the University of Chicago and went on to receive an MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University. After making a handful of arty narrative shorts which screened at festivals both in the US and internationally, Bourne started out in documentary television as an editor, cutting shows for National Geographic and Discovery. It was on A&E’s critically acclaimed real-life cop show The First 48 that Bourne made his mark as a producer, moving up from editor to showrunner in just three years. With a sharp focus on sculpting stories for emotion, drama and suspense, Bourne helped shape the program into one of the most watched real-life investigative series on television. Bourne went on to merge his narrative storytelling sensibilities with documentary projects in several genres, from the nightlife series 3AM on Showtime to History Channel’s Roanoke: Search for the Lost Colony. 

In 2016, Bourne turned his focus to the political world as one of the showrunners on Showtime’s groundbreaking fast-turnaround series The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth, where he helped figure out a way to make a polished, cinematic show on a super-fast weekly schedule. In the last couple of years, he also helped develop the New York Times series The Weekly for FX and Hulu, and helped adapt the hit podcast Slow Burn for Epix. But with the 2020 elections looming, he’s back in the cockpit on The Circus, which promises to be filled with drama and many narrative twist and turns!