The Big Picture With Kal Penn
Season 1
TV-14
A variety of topics are analyzed using interviews and data collection to create information maps with statistics.
Where to Watch Season 1
12 Episodes
- Crime, Inc.
E1Episode 1Crime, Inc.Explore how the small, rural town of St. Albans, Vermont, is making big money for drug dealers; how the local economy in Canon City, Colorado, benefits from incarceration; and how the gangs in Washington, D.C., compete to control territory, a fight that is happening more and more through social media. - Treasure Hunt
E2Episode 2Treasure HuntWe’re on a quest to dig up the goods, from the most remote ends of the earth to our own backyards. And we’re charting a course to where X really does mark the spot of buried treasure. We’ll travel to northeastern Nevada, where more gold has been found than in the entire California Gold Rush. And in Defiance, Ohio, we’ll meet a family who discovered a bin of old baseball cards and found out that these rare collectibles are worth millions. Finally, we journey to Lodz, Poland, with treasure hunters seeking gold and jewels thought to be lost forever from World War II. - Sex Drive
E3Episode 3Sex DriveAll sex is not created equal, and some places are blessed with more of it than others. As we deconstruct the data of our everyday lives, sometimes that includes surprising, intimate details from our private lives. Host Kal Penn takes a look at what's going on in bedrooms all across the world. - Going Viral
E4Episode 4Going ViralKal Penn goes "viral" to uncover what causes and drives pandemics around the world, and what can make them even more dangerous than you think. Go to a Chinese animal market where one of the most infamous pandemics of our age started. Visit scientists on the front lines fighting the most dangerous creatures in the world, the mosquito. See how a top-secret lab is preparing us for the scariest "what if" situations of bioterrorism in the U.S. - Fantasy Sports
E5Episode 5Fantasy SportsData and number crunching have taken over the world of sports. The highest proportion of NFL players comes from the small towns of the Louisiana bayou, thanks to a unique combination of roads, talent and history. We travel to Argentina to meet the highly organized soccer hooligans of Buenos Aires, who look more like a mafia than a fan club. Picking a name and mascot for your team is a serious business. Is it better to go for a top name (“‘Eagles” is most popular in the U.S.) or a rare one? - Surviving Nature’s Fury
E6Episode 6Surviving Nature’s FuryAs we build an overlapping map of natural disaster threats around the world, we make an unsettling discovery: Mother Nature has handed us our eviction notice, and almost no place is truly safe. Drought is a major threat around the world, and in San Angelo, Texas, pilots are fighting back by seeding the clouds to create weather the local ranchers desperately need. We travel to Iceland to delve into a town on the edge of a volcano where residents dodge molten lava and constantly rebuild as eruptions eat their property. The U.S. has more damaging weather and disaster threats than any other nation, and the epicenter of it all is New Madrid, Missouri, home to the biggest earthquake in American history, along with a laundry list of other potentially deadly natural disasters. - Cash for Trash
E9Episode 9Cash for TrashWaste? Garbage? Yucky stuff that smells bad? Whether we're trashing it, reusing it or flushing it, the whole idea with junk is getting as far away from it as possible. Look at the numbers, though, and you'll quickly see that you're wasting some golden opportunities. All around the world there are clever people making the most of our trash and getting filthy, stinking rich. - Space Invasion
E10Episode 10Space InvasionKal Penn explores the everyday ways we've made ourselves at home in outer space. From GPS to TV broadcasts, a remarkable number of our everyday activities rely on outer space. Visit the Utah desert where people with aspirations to colonize Mars simulate living on the planet to research its viability. In Kansas, hunt for 40,000-year-old meteorites. Finally, a homemade satellite is built and launched with college-age enthusiasts. - Body City
E11Episode 11Body CityThink of the human body as a city unto itself, with buildings, utilities, traffic patterns and rules and regulations that make the whole place hum. Our bodies aren't done evolving — they have urban development too, in the form of new technology implanted to enhance our abilities. - Off the Map
E12Episode 12Off the MapYou’d think after thousands of years of exploring and mapping the earth that we’d know where everything is by now. Well, we don’t. Not even close. We’re going on a global quest to reveal the mislabeled, the mysterious and the just plain missing places off the map. We travel to Washington, D.C., to discover that the U.S. government has its own maps, and they reveal a very different country where top secret installations are connected by unmarked roads and underground tunnels.
