1902: The MTV Chronicles

HOUR ONE opens where the whole thing opens - Moscow, 1989, the Moscow Music Peace Festival, which Adam calls the big CIA op. Doc McGee's Learjet gets busted in Florida with an unbelievable amount of marijuana on board and the way out is organising a concert in Moscow. Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Skid Row and Ozzy on the plane, the Scorpions picked up in Frankfurt, and a Soviet audience who had no idea who any of them were except Ozzy. Then the actual 1988 videotape out of Adam's own VHS archive, the 2008 first telling with the Hell's Angels on Java bikes, and a thirty-second button on Red Square at three in the morning.

Clips — 4

The long one, and the best-loved. Recorded the week Prince died, and the frame is Adam refusing to be the third ex-MTV VJ on television reflecting about Prince. A Sam Goody commercial at the Mall of America, a midnight phone call, a car downstairs, and Paisley Park lit up purple.

Clips — 1

Four interviews, four different kinds of wrong. Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood falling into a London hotel room in 1976; Quincy Jones bringing his own bottle of Chateau Latour to a live coast-to-coast broadcast; Gene Simmons wanting to know exactly whom he has to blow to get a video on the network; and Phil Collins greeting Adam with an insult that has stuck for forty years.

Clips — 4

Three artists Adam worked with and three completely different readings of what they were like when the camera stopped - Tina Turner, Madonna, and David Bowie in Malta, which is not Adam's encounter at all but Patricia's.

Clips — 3

Michael Jackson twice. The contractual clause that forced MTV to say King of Pop every single time, which cost them an entire weekend of taping when nobody told the talent - and then the hair. And the apple crate, half of which is John explaining the film-industry sizing.

Clips — 2

The ones that do not fit anywhere else. A supersonic flight ruined by the passenger behind him, a movie star on a private jet, a beauty contest in New Jersey, a record executive with a piranha tank, and a soft-rock singer who tried to get Adam fired - which John, on tape, cannot believe is a real person.

Clips — 5

HOUR TWO starts at the beginning: how the job actually worked. Adam's first big live gig a month after arriving at MTV, the virtual-set experiment that put him inside a television on a diner counter, the reason Spring Break exists at all, and how the Video Vanguard Award got invented in a room.

Clips — 4

Four interviews that went sideways, and Adam is the one who comes off worst in three of them. Mick Jagger on Adam's Tourette's, Rosie O'Donnell using her own audition to roast the man running it, and two questions Adam would like back - one of which Mick Fleetwood answered in a way that ended the conversation.

Clips — 4

On the road, where most of the job actually happened. A hug from the biggest man Adam ever interviewed, a wave runner at the Beach House, and one celebrity motor race told from both ends - the man who won it and the man who hit the wall.

Clips — 4

The players. Steve Stevens handing Adam a signed guitar and Joe Satriani teaching him the only lesson that matters, the gold and platinum records still on Adam's wall, and Def Leppard's solution to having no backstage - which turns into a second story about David Lee Roth that has not been told on this show before.

Clips — 3

Two stories in their earliest surviving versions, both from the show's first year, when nobody was listening. The North Pole runs longer than any later telling and keeps going past the point where every other version stops. The Prince story is the 2008 original - the same night as hour one, told eight years earlier, with details the 2016 telling does not have.

Clips — 2

Three encounters where the story is not what was said but what Adam saw. Whitney Houston, Raquel Welch and Jamie Lee Curtis - and in the last one it is what she said after the recording stopped.

Clips — 3

What the MTV job opened doors to, and one door that closed before he got to it. Lunch with the King and Queen of the Netherlands, an invitation from Buckingham Palace, an invitation from the White House that arrived too late, and a retired general who knew exactly one thing about Adam.

Clips — 4

The ending, and it is the whole arc in four parts. Adam registers mtv.com because nobody at MTV thinks the internet is going to be anything, runs a Gopher server off it, and gets sued for it when he leaves. Then the reason he left Headbangers Ball, which he only learned for certain when a book came out. And then, twenty years later, being written out of MTV's own thirtieth anniversary.

Clips — 4