‘This is everybody’s problem’: inside America’s growing sewage crisis

The time has come for a long overdue conversation about a menace with the potential for a sweeping crisis, an urgent threat to the very fabric of American society: poop. Everybody does it, but we’d rather not think about it, and avoid discussing it unless we have to. In new docuseries Wasteland (now streaming on Paramount Plus), director Elisa Gambino informs us in no uncertain terms that we do have to, and isn’t hesitant about showing us why.

“The philosophy for us was to try to present poop in a serious way, which is hard, because it’s so easy to slip into potty humor,” Gambino said over the phone during a stopover in Montana. “But we wanted to look at poop and how it affects environmental justice, to treat it with seriousness without being