Nat Geo to flag up US ingenuity

National Geographic Channel (NGC) in the US has greenlit a factual series about the country’s greatest minds.

American Genius is being produced by Stephen David Entertainment, which previously made The Men Who Built America for History.

The series will profile some of the greatest minds in US history, from founding father Ben Franklin and telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell to the late Apple supremo Steve Jobs and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg.

An airdate has not yet been set but production is underway.

NGC president Howard T Owens said: “In an era when America is not always credited as leading ingenuity, this show will remind us that this country has always been a global hotbed for genius, and we will celebrate the way they changed the world we live in.”

The series follows NGC’s successful Brain Games series, which used a series of mind-boggling experiments and hard science to explore the workings of the human brain. Second seasons of that show and science and statistics series The Numbers Game are in production.