It Happened Here

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.