Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I Am Richard Pryor’ On Paramount Network, An Honest Portrait Of The Legendary Comedian

Richard Pryor is one of the best standup comedians ever, full stop. Comedy nerds (like us) recognize that Pryor and George Carlin are the gold standard that few comics, even superstars, have met since the two of them were at their peak. But Pryor is the more fascinating figure because of his rough childhood and penchant for self-destruction. The new documentary I Am Richard Pryor tries to summarize his life in an hour plus commercials. Can it be done?

I AM RICHARD PRYOR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: I Am Richard Pryor is part of Paramount Network’s I Am series of documentaries about entertainment and political figures, told via the people that knew them best. In this episode, legendary comedian Richard Pryor is profiled. Via archival interviews with Pryor, who died in 2005, plus interviews with comedians like Jimmie Walker, Sandra Bernhard, Lily Tomlin, Howie Mandel, Tiffany Haddish and Mike Epps, plus Pryor biographers and confidantes including his widow Jennifer Lee Pryor (also an executive producer), director Jesse James Miller tries to tell a balanced story about Pryor.

It starts with the peak of Pryor’s career, where he was a top movie star, had a controversial NBC variety show, and performed his best standup during the movie Richard Pryor Live In Concert. Then it reaches back to the sixties, when Pryor was an up-and-coming comic doing TV shows like Ed Sullivan but not doing material he wanted, and hurting from playing in front of all-white audiences. Those phases of his career are there in context to launch into his childhood in Peoria, Ill, growing up in his grandmother’s brothel, where his father was an enforcer, his mother was a prostitute, and his grandmother was essentially his mother. The context is there to show why Pryor, after a disastrous Las Vegas stint in 1969 where he had a meltdown, moved to Berkeley and started to transform himself and his standup.

The movie then gets into his early ’70s successes, including his first comedy album, That N—-r’s Crazy, and small but significant movie roles, and moves to his late ’70s, early ’80s peak, where his mainstream movie stardom clashed with his truth-to-power standup act. But it also talks about his drug use, his overextended nature, his womanizing, and his depression, ultimately culminating when he set himself on fire while freebasing in June, 1980.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Well, Showtime had a Jennifer Pryor-produced, Marina Zenovich-directed documentary called Richard Pryor: Omit The Logic back in 2013. So we’ll go with that.

Performance Worth Watching: Mike Epps has a long monologue about how angry Pryor must have felt about, even during his peak standup period, seeing people pay money to laugh at his pain. Maybe Epps knew Pryor well, or maybe he’s just channeling Pryor’s feeling through his own experience. Either way, it’s a telling point of view.

Memorable Dialogue: “I wanted to prove to Richard that I was going to love him no matter what, and this love would fix everything. But there was a mound of cocaine on an antique child’s desk,” says Jennifer Lee about the time she tried to coax him back to the set of Stir Crazy.

Sex and Skin: Interesting that, while Jennifer Pryor and others talk about Pryor’s womanizing and inability to maintain a relationship, they don’t mention that he was married 7 times, twice to Jennifer.

Our Take: What you may think of I Am Richard Pryor depends on how much you know about Pryor’s life and career, and if you’ve seen Omit The Logic. Despite Jennifer Pryor’s objections over the direction Zennovich went with that 2013 film (my dueling interviews with the two of them is one of my all-time favorite pieces), especially Zennovich’s concentration on Pryor immolating himself in 1980, the older documentary covers the same ground as I Am, and covers it better.

This is by no means a hagiography of Pryor, however, and if you only knew Pryor from his standup movies and albums, or — even more likely — movies like Brewster’s Millions and The Toy — I Am Richard Pryor will give you a good idea of how Pryor’s tragic childhood led him to be the genius standup and activist he became in his 30s. That childhood also informs the issues he had with drug addiction, the emotional and physical abuse that dotted his relationships with women, and the push-and-pull between daring and mainstream that his career became.

But it skims over a lot of stuff, like that aforementioned ’80s movie career, as well as the trips to Africa he took that led him to stop using the n-word by the time he did the post-fire standup movie Live on the Sunset Strip. His MS diagnosis, decline, and death don’t get a lot of time, either (do people remember his guest spot on Chicago Hope as an MS patient?). Perhaps the 90-minute version that was shown at SXSW has that info, but it seems like Paramount sliced out a lot of info in order to fit it into their network’s timeslot.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Watch Richard Pryor: Omit The Logic, which is available at Showtime’s various streaming apps.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream I Am Richard Pryor on the Paramount Network