UPCOMING EPISODES

John Belushi achieved international fame by expertly playing abrasive, obnoxious, and juvenile characters, both as a cast member on Saturday Night Live and in iconic films like The Blues Brothers, and Animal House. Everything about Belushi was larger than life, and his desire to be the life of the party drove him down a dark path of substance abuse, culminating in his untimely death in 1982 at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. We’ll discover how John became the life of the party at the Seven Dwarfs restaurant in his hometown of Wheaton, Illinois, and visit the main stage of the Second City in Chicago where he cultivated the characters that would later make him famous, discover a little-known location in Toronto, Canada where John and his best friend Dan Aykroyd created the Blues Brothers, and tour The Rainbow Room and On the Rox – two of John’s favorite Sunset Strip hot spots, and where he went on an epic bender with shadowy figure Cathy Smith on the final night of his life.

Legendary comedian Joan Rivers was a woman ahead of her time – the quintessential New York comic who paved the way for all female stand-ups who came in her wake. But her early life was filled with rejection, insecurity, and failure. And even after she did make it – and was primed to take over The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson – a series of mistakes and misunderstandings lead to the suicide of her husband Edgar in 1987, causing her own despair and depression that she nearly succumbed to. We’ll visit the locations that shaped and impacted who Joan became – the street on Crown Heights in Brooklyn where she grew up; The Bitter End club in Greenwich Village, where a chance encounter with Lenny Bruce changed her life; the sprawling Bel Air mansion where she lived in the 1980s with her husband Edgar before his death; and a plastic surgeon’s office in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where years after her remarkable comeback, she died after a botched operation.

Richard Pryor was a comedy truth teller, who busted taboos about race, language, and sexuality. But what made Richard so raw and honest, was also the source of his troubled and tumultuous personal life – bouts of addiction, domestic abuse, and host of other personal demons, which culminated in a very public drug-induced meltdown on Parthenia Street in Los Angeles, where he lit himself on fire and ran down the street in an unhinged suicide attempt. We’ll travel to Richard’s hometown of Peoria, Illinois to find the source for his demons, and for his brilliant comedic mind – the elementary school where he first performed comedy, and the Community Center where he honed his craft, and to his compound on Parthenia Street in the San Fernando Valley, where he nearly died in 1980, before making a remarkable comeback.