This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Bean Cooley.

Tonight and Saturday night, HBO presents a two-night, four-hour documentary called George

Carlin's American Dream. It's perfect. Thought-provoking, insightful, revelatory, and at times

very funny, which, for a study about a comedian's life and work, it had better be.

Judd Appetow, a stand-up comedian turned film writer and director, already has made one

stellar biography about a comic for HBO, the Zen Diaries of Gary Shanling in 2018.

Now he and co-director Michael Bunfiglio have made another by following, in minute detail,

a comedian's process, progress, and personal triumphs and demons.

George Carlin's American Dream is astoundingly thorough in both the grounded covers and its

approach. Archival sources, audio tapes, home movies, old TV show clips from Mike Douglas

and Dina Shore to Merv Griffin and Tony Orlando are plentiful and used well.

Intimate details of George Carlin's personal life are revealed in old and new interviews

with some of those who truly knew him best, his brother Patrick, his first wife Brenda,

and his daughter Kelly. All of them look at George's life and their own with the objective

honesty that George eventually brought to his stand-up act.

And while we learn of George's abusive father and oppressive mother and of George and

Brenda's descent into drugs and alcoholism respectively, we also learn about what drove

George Carlin to keep developing and altering his approach to comedy.

In audio tapes recorded for his autobiography, Last Words, Carlin explains his disdain for

authority figures in almost clinically detached terms.

My own experience of authority is one of opposition to not just questioning authority, but actively

opposing it and trying to undo what it had in mind.

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