Liar City

Liar City retells true stories in which a rumor, a persona or an outright falsehood traveled further than it should have. Brian hosts. Darian sits in alongside him, reacting, joking and asking the obvious follow-up questions. The introductions are a bit of their own: Darian has been billed as Brian's 'gal Friday', as 'all of America's Huckleberry', and once as a man wearing the same clothes as in the previous episode. The stories cover a lot of ground. In one, a private investigator decides that a missing 16-year-old named Egbert went into the tunnels to play a real-life version of Dungeons & Dragons and lost track of reality, then says so at press conferences. The news coverage that followed spent more time on the game than on the boy, who was still missing. That story sits under the title 'Satanic Panic V: Mazes and Monsters', and its numeral marks it as part of a longer run. In 'Freedom Club', a shy college student who is emotionally too young for campus life ends up in a study designed to find a person's psychological breaking point and push him to it, once a week for three years. When that account brushes against a rumored MKUltra connection, the hosts say plainly that they could not find confirmation from any reputable source. Andy Kaufman gets two episodes, 'That's Entertainment! (Part One)' and 'How I Got To Memphis (Kaufman Part 2)'. The first sets him against the 1970s comedy wave of Robin Williams, Steve Martin, George Carlin and Richard Pryor. It also plays his Elvis impression and notes that he called himself a 'song and dance man' rather than a comedian. The second reaches a 1982 phone-in vote with two 1-900 numbers and Eddie Murphy leaning on the home audience to keep him. The result went the other way, and Kaufman turned to wrestling women. 'The Boys in the Bank' follows a man who landed in Greenwich Village the same week a man landed on the moon and joined the Gay Activist Alliance. He is heard describing those years in his own words. Grief comes up at the top of episodes too. 'A Viking Funeral With Gram Parsons' opens on a roll call of entertainers who had recently died, Alan Rickman, Harper Lee and Glenn Frey among them, before settling on David Bowie and a news bulletin reporting his death. The humor leans toward nerd jokes, and one episode closes on a debate about whether an enrichment spell is real, settled when one host declares himself the dungeon master. The hosts normally finish with a stretch on how the story made them feel and where it fits. The first Kaufman episode holds that back because the story is not finished. Music sometimes plays them out, and several episodes end on the same instruction: tell somebody the truth. What a listener gets is strange history told by two people who are clearly invested in it, nervous about the core of one story and openly excited about the next part of another.