President Joe Biden’s dramatic decision to drop his bid for a second term upended what had already been an unprecedented election season that included the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally.

We have been filming and reporting across these turbulent months, and tonight, Aug. 6, we are officially kicking off our political coverage in the runup to the election with a two-hour special, Biden’s Decision.

This epic documentary traces Biden’s determination in the face of challenges, controversies, triumphs and tragedies over five decades in politics, and goes behind one of the toughest decisions of his life.

“There’s a lot of fights that you can have in politics,” Toluse Olorunnipa, White House bureau chief at The Washington Post, says in the film. “But you can never win the fight against time.”

From veteran chronicler of U.S. politics Michael Kirk and his team, who have made five installments of FRONTLINE’s election-year special The Choice and more than 25 documentaries about the Biden, Trump and Obama eras, Biden’s Decision airs Aug. 6 at a special time — 9/8c — on PBS (check local listings).

The documentary features revealing new interviews with those who know Biden well, including former chief of staff Ron Klain, former press secretary Jen Psaki, and former campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon. It also draws on interviews our producers conducted throughout Biden’s career, including with his wife, Jill Biden; his sister Valerie Biden Owens; his Secretary of State Antony Blinken; and other influential figures.

Without missing a beat after Biden dropped out of the race, Michael Kirk and his team not only pivoted to put tonight’s film together, but they have kept up their work on the newest installment of The Choice, which will now focus on the contest between the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, and the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. As always, The Choice will be unflinching in its examination of the candidates’ lives, and revelatory in the way it helps show how both could lead the country.

The Choice 2024 will premiere on Sept. 24, and our coverage will continue throughout the fall. For the first time, we are producing a separate documentary offering interwoven investigative biographies of the vice presidential candidates. And we’ll bring you an update of American Voices: A Nation in Turmoil, our election-year project from 2020, that will return to characters we met four years ago and trace the trajectory of their hopes and fears and points of view ahead of the vote in November.

Though the fall will be dominated by the historic election, we have much more in store beyond that. We are working on a special film that chronicles the human toll of the Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza — told by people directly impacted on both sides of the conflict. We are also preparing a deeply reported documentary investigating the state of U.S.-China relations and key turning points between the two countries.

I will continue to share more details on other important documentaries in the works here at FRONTLINE. Thank you for watching tonight, and in the months to come.