Amid quarantine, live vicariously through this USC alum who travels the world for PBS

As quarantining and social distancing have taken over daily life, it can be difficult to remember a time when someone could get on a plane and fly across the world.

Fortunately for the isolated, they can live vicariously through Earl Bridges, a University of South Carolina alumnus who travels the world for his new PBS show The Good Road.

The Good Road is a cross between “an extreme adventure show” and a worldwide look at grassroots activism, Bridges told The State.

“It’s always interesting we know more about these celebrity chefs who make a bacon cheeseburger than these people who have these really interesting backstories,” Bridges said.

His protagonists include Kenyan anti-poaching activists, Western doctors who provide a clinic in impoverished parts of Uganda and a Burmese punk rock band helping to feed the poor and give school supplies to kids.

“In order to care about these characters, you need to know a little about them,” Bridges said. “I’ve got more in common with this punk rocker Jojo than I do with my neighbors in Charleston.”

Though Bridges was born in Georgia, lives in South Carolina and graduated from USC’s international business school — now named after philanthropist Darla Moore — he grew up far from the American Southeast. While his father served as an F-4 phantom pilot in the Vietnam war, Bridges grew up in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. That’s where he met his friend and co-host Craig Martin.

In Thailand, Bridges attended International School Bangkok, where he attended school alongside everyone from Vietnamese refugees to sons and daughters of ambassadors to former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, he said.

Bridges isn’t the only USC alum to be featured in the show. An organization run by Harish Mamtani, who met Bridges while the two were at USC’s international business school, will be the subject of a season two episode of The Good Road, Bridges and Mamtani told The State.

Mamtani runs three schools in India, his home country, that offer private schooling for low-income students. The three schools, for 13-year-olds and younger in Hyderabad, charge as little at $10 a month for a private education.

Mamtani, who began his career in financial management, became inspired to run schools in India because he had returned to his home country and saw that some schools were no better off than when he graduated in the ‘80s, he said.

“I thought we could do better than that,” Mamtani said. “My goal was to start a school to serve the underprivileged.”

Each of the 30-minute episodes centers around what the characters try to do help others in sometimes-dire circumstances. Bridges uses the term “philanthropology” to describe how the docuseries studies philanthropy.

Bridges and Martin find the subjects of their stories by “leaning into people we know,” Bridges said. For example, The Good Road has a scene from the inside of a maximum security prison in Bangkok where the story addresses criminal justice reform. It’s not usually easy to get into a maximum security prison in Thailand, but a friend of his was a friend of the warden, so they were able to persuade the warden to let them in, Bridges said.

The connections lead to more connections, Bridges said. Sometimes those doing the philanthropy are from large organizations or Western countries, and other times they’re serving the communities around them.

“You don’t need a mandate from somebody to do good,” Bridges said.

The first episode of The Good Road will premiere on Sunday at 5 p.m. on WRLK.