Blackside developed a systemized approach to long-form documentary television production over the seven years that it took them to complete the first series of Eyes on the Prize. Their challenge with Eyes I was how to tell a complex and contentious history of the civil rights movement that covered ten years of American history.  To do so required hundreds of hours of researching in archives, consulting with scholars, interviewing activists, editing episodes, and revising them for broadcast. And it needed to be approachable to a general (meaning middle-class and white) PBS audience that had a growing number of entertainment options. That meant meeting the production quality and narrative style of major network TV programs to be successful.

Their solution was to break up the production of the series into teams of two producers that were each responsible for two episodes. To provide some degree of objectivity to the historical events the series covered, Henry Hampton built each team so they were balanced by race and gender. To ensure a cohesive house style across the entire series, each step of the process – research and planning, scriptwriting, interviewing, and editing – was vetted by the entire Blackside team and often outside consultants as well. This made the process way more laborious and time-consuming. But having a large group of filmmakers and scholarly experts ensure that the episodes were historically accurate, emotionally affecting, and politically inspiring is one of the reasons Eyes on the Prize remains crucial viewing for all Americans.

This was, basically, the process Blackside used for Eyes II. The main difference was that everything was bigger in the second series. It covered ten more years than the first. To meet this larger historical scope, Eyes II added one more production team with two more hours of programming. While many of the production and writing staff remained for the second part of Eyes, James De Vinney was the only episode producer who stayed. Blackside had to onboard seven new producers for Eyes II. And the second series interviewed fifty percent more people than the first. However, due to Blackside’s efficient production methods, they were able to complete this even more ambitious series in about the same amount of time as it took them to produce the first version from 1985 to 1987.

Exploratory planning for a second series began before the first episode of the first season aired in 1987. Pre-production began in earnest in early 1988. As with the first program, Blackside held what it named the Eyes on the Prize School for the recently assembled production teams. In six full days across the end of April and beginning of May, the Blackside staff heard from scholars, politicians, and activists including Grace Boggs, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Sonia Sanchez, John Lewis, and Vincent Harding. The intensive Eyes School was a team-building exercise for the new production teams. It gave them a shared historical background on the major events the series would be covering. Moreover, it was a way for the knowledge of these scholars and activists to influence the program’s narrative as Blackside only interviewed people who experienced the events first hand.

After the Eyes School, the teams began developing the scope of the episodes and the historical events each would contain. By July 1988, each team had constructed synopses and outlines that went through multiple rounds of comments and revisions. Treatments were finalized by that October. At the same time, researchers were scouring archives and news libraries for stock footage. Series producers were tracking down potential interviewees and conducting the first round of audio-only pre-interviews, which were a way to gather information not yet in history books and to vet individuals for later onscreen interviews. Blackside sent out a number of teams around the country to conduct most of the filmed interviews from the end of 1988 through the summer of 1989. Each team finished the episodes’ scripts by early 1989. The first round of editing occurred that summer. Julian Bond recorded his narration in the fall of 1989. After editing Mr. Bond’s voiceover into the episodes, the teams applied one last round of tweaks and improvements at the end of the year. The first episode of Eyes II aired in January of 1990. 

Coordination across the teams during the production process was crucial to finishing the series on time and within budget. In a few cases, an interview would be a collaborative effort between two teams – the interviews with Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka, Elaine Brown, and Bobby Seale are notable collaborations. These interviews appear in more than one episode and touch on more topics than other interviews that were only used to discuss one topic.

Blackside's efforts at standardizing its documentary filmmaking is evident in production documents, allowing for a sense of how the teams achieved the consistency of tone and style across the episodes. A field shoot guide from September 1988 provided instructions on budgeting, filming, and traveling for shoots that ensured the interviews looked and sounded similar regardless of the location, interviewer, and cinematographer. 

Efficiency was key for Blackside during the production of the interviews. For example, according to itineraries for a three-day shoot in San Francisco, crews recorded two different interviews a day.

At times, the group nature of the production lead to debates on the look or direction of the series. This was especially true regarding the planning of the eighth episode. Not only would that be the last episode of Eyes II, but it was the final word on both series of Eyes on the Prize. The goal of the final episode was to offer a retrospective of the series and the overall civil rights movement, but also to show the work that still had to be done to achieve racial justice in America. Some producers advocated that the episode should jump to the present day. They suggested adopting a more vérité approach rather than the archival footage, new interviews, and Julian Bond’s narration that the rest of the series uses. Doing so would be a way to signal to the audience the struggle was ongoing and that it was no time to avert one’s gaze from the prize of freedom and equality.

This debate can be seen in a January 1989 document that summarizes the ongoing discussion on the shape of the eighth episode. During the treatment stage in July 1988, there were two different working concepts for the episodes.

The decision was made to stick with the formula that had been so successful for Eyes I. One justification was budgetary. A different style of documentary storytelling for just one episode would require funds that the production did not have. The other justification was the events of the early 1980s that the episode ended up covered needed to be told.

In the final episode, the producers decided to cover the murder of Arthur McDuffie by law enforcement and the subsequent unrest in Miami, and Harold Washington’s election as Chicago mayor. Although southern, Miami is not a locale often associated with the civil rights movement. Blackside wanted to open viewers’ eyes to issues and events that took place in areas that lacked the same connection to the history of civil rights that states like Mississippi and Alabama do. The history of the civil rights movement was not just a history of the south as shown in Eyes I, or a more recent history of northern urban cities, as most of the rest of Eyes II recounted. It’s the history, present, and future of America.

The scale of the production is observable in a 1990 memo to Henry Hampton that detailed notable statistics about the second series after it was completed. To make the eight episodes, the four teams produced or licensed: 

• From over 80 different stock footage sources. 
• 183 interviews were shot, averaging to over 22 per episode.  
• The average episode used 75 rolls of film – a total of over 600 rolls for the entire series. 
• 157 songs were included, with an average of 20 songs per episode.