Most people know Edvard Munch for a single image, The Scream. This episode goes far beyond that pop-culture icon to trace the full arc of the Norwegian painter's life: a childhood shaped by tuberculosis, poverty and a father's fear-based religious piety, a rebellious young adulthood in the Christiania Bohème, the Berlin scandal that made him famous, and the turbulent romance that ended with a gunshot, two damaged fingers and a portrait sawed in half.

We follow Munch through the 1908 breakdown that sent him to Dr. Daniel Jacobson's clinic in Copenhagen, the electrification treatments and enforced sobriety that stabilized him, and the bright, optimistic work that followed on his farm at Ekely. The story ends with the Nazi regime labeling him degenerate in Germany, then attempting to claim him as a Nordic hero in occupied Norway, and hijacking ...