As The Mega-Brands That Built America Season 3 comes to a close tonight, the HISTORY series has quietly become even better than before. Anyone who watched Season 1 or Season 2 knows that this is one of the top unscripted shows on television, but Season 3 is the best of the bunch.

HISTORY has built its own brand with the Built America franchise, which has spanned everything from food to gambling. The network has found a way to balance its mission of history-centric programming with the viewers’ need for entertainment. But of all these series, Mega-Brands is the most memorable for a variety of reasons, and Season 3 has come along at a particularly important time. There are all kinds of questions about the American economy, and while this show is obviously looking backward, it has a surprising relevance.

The entire point of Mega-Brands is to educate audiences on the stories of the brands that they see every day. It’s putting faces and names to corporate logos, which is a massive educational tool—make something relatable and people will care more about it. But in Season 3, these stories are more human and particularly easy to connect with. One example is Season 3, Episode 5, “Rise of the Office Machines.” There’s an incredible amount of trial and error in this episode—more than viewers would likely attribute to these big brand names. And this season has done an excellent job of highlighting that the process of how something gets made means just as much as why it’s created.

Normally, by the third season of any TV show (scripted or unscripted), creative teams have to come into their own. Many of the best ideas are used in Season 1 to get to Season 2, and the point of Season 2 is to stretch the legs of a concept and go that next level deeper. Season 3 is when a show should have a strong sense of self, but it also might not have as many ideas. The Mega-Brands That Built America Season 3 has found stories that may not be the biggest attention-grabbers, but they should have been. The best example is Season 3, Episode 8, “Pants on Fire,” because an episode about the history of jeans sounds incredibly mundane—yet it really isn’t.

These are stories that may not have been recognizable enough to do in Season 1, but the producers have outdone themselves finding brands that still have cache with the audience. This show is getting better as it goes along, instead of trying to make stories bigger than they are, or trying to find stories at all. There’s an honesty to the program that makes it work. The way the show is produced matches perfectly with the blue-collar ethos of the stories being told.

And as viewers have more questions about the economy, about what to spend their money on, about some of these big brands, The Mega-Brands That Built America hits differently now than it did even a season ago. Especially in the latter part of the season, there’s an increased focus on the lasting impact that each brand has. There’s a little more time devoted to the present day, in addition to the history. Fans leave more informed the next time they go to the store (or the online store), which makes those big concepts seem not so big.

There’s no word yet on whether or not Mega-Brands will have Season 4, but it certainly deserves one. There aren’t many series that can perfectly connect the present and the past, and do it in a way that has a tangible impact on the audience. HISTORY has outdone itself this season, and hopefully there will be more stories like these as people look closer at these massive brands than ever before.

The Mega-Brands That Built America airs Sundays at 10:00 p.m. on HISTORY. Episodes from all three seasons are also streaming on the HISTORY app, history.com and on demand. Photo Credit: A&E Television Networks/Lucky8, courtesy of the HISTORY Channel.

Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.