Plot Synopsis

THE BIG PICTURE WITH KAL PENN is all about finding the unexpected -- and sometimes surprising -- realities in both the world at large and our own backyard, revealed by crunching the numbers and finding new ways to visualize data. Host and producer Kal Penn takes viewers on a journey to understand how things like money, sex, food, sports and crime influence our daily lives, while exploring and generating infographics from information banks and data analyses. Plus, Penn utilizes documentary vignettes to tell stories that make the connections personal, introducing the real people who live and work at key intersections of each theme being explored. In the series opener, "Crime, Inc," Kal delves into 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. Then in the second episode on premiere night, "Treasure Hunt," travel to northeastern Nevada, where more gold has been found than in the entire California Gold Rush. And in Defiance, Ohio, meet a family who discovered a bin of old baseball cards and found out that these rare collectibles are worth millions. Finally, journey to Lodz, Poland, with treasure hunters seeking gold and jewels thought to be lost forever from World War II.
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On Monday, May 18, 2015 at 8pm ET/PT, Nat Geo premiered the season finale of THE BIG PICTURE WITH KAL PENN. The season ender, "Off the Map," goes on a global quest to reveal the mislabeled, the mysterious and the just plain missing places off the map. The show travels 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. Then it heads to San Francisco, California, as high-tech research vessels map the deep oceans and a scrappy group of DIY explorers launches ROVs from tiny inflatable rafts. Finally, the show travels to China to the world's second largest cave system, where a daring explorer plunges thousands of feet to map the depths.