Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus

A martial arts prodigy emigrates from China to San Francisco and becomes a hatchet man for an organized crime family in this action series.

A look at the professional and personal lives of the staff at New York's Knickerbocker Hospital during the early part of the twentieth century. Every day they must deal with lack of funding, personal conflicts, egotism, racial tensions, personal vices, drug addiction, affairs, closed minds, dated nigh-medieval medical techniques and them and their experimental new techniques being misunderstood by most, in order to keep the hospital going and give the ill the help they need. The pressure is enormous and leaves its mark on the souls of most of them.

Six hundred miles from the coast of Africa, in September 1942, a German U-boat, U-156, sinks the British troopship Laconia carrying 1,800 Italian POWs, 80 British civilians, and 268 Polish and British soldiers. After realising that there were POWs and civilians on-board, and that they are facing certain death without rescue, U-Boat Commander Werner Hartenstein (Duken) makes a decision goes against the orders of Nazi high command. The U-boat surfaces and Hartenstein instructs his men to save as many of the shipwrecked survivors as they can. Over the next few days U-156 saved 400 people, with 200 people crammed on board the surface-level submarine and another 200 in lifeboats. Hartenstein gave orders for messages to be sent out to the Allies to organise a rescue of the survivors, but they were spotted by American B-24 Liberator bombers which moved in to attack. The Sinking of the Laconia takes a look at the human side of the remarkable events that took place: the friendships that developed, the small acts of heroism, and the triumph of the human spirit in the most incredible of situations.