Picture the composer of the most sweeping fantasy film score of the 21st century, then picture the same man decades earlier in a fuzzy bee costume playing saxophone behind Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi on late-night television. This episode charts the improbable evolution of Howard Shore, born in Toronto in 1946, who befriended Lorne Michaels at summer camp at 13, studied at Berklee, played in the jazz-rock band Lighthouse, and became the original musical director of Saturday Night Live from 1975 to 1980, where he wrote the theme music and suggested the name The Blues Brothers.

We follow Shore into the darkness of his decades-long partnership with David Cronenberg starting with The Brood in 1979, his work with Martin Scorsese, and the suffocating low-register score for The Silence of the Lambs, alongside mainstream hits like Mrs. Doubtfire a ...