The Wall Street Journal’s John Anderson writes in his review of ‘Our Towns’ the HBO documentary, “The viewpoint is clear: What’s happening everywhere is, in fact, happening everywhere. Drug problems, space problems, housing problems, race problems. No one escapes these. But in smaller towns, things may be more manageable. And making life tangibly better seems more achievable, with a combination of resilience and community.”

Anderson concludes that although the presumption that the “real” America exists in the so-called heartland is not a new, the idea that the differences between the problems of major cities and smaller towns is really a question of scale, is.