The art of Kevin Blythe Sampson

THE ART OF
KEVIN BLYTHE SAMPSON

11/19/11

Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Layover’ on Travel Channel - NYTimes.com

Television

Going Abroad, Staying Authentic

Gilles Mingasson/Travel Channel

Anthony Bourdain in Santa Monica, Calif., in a scene from his travel and food show, “The Layover,” on the Travel Channel.

SLUMPED in the back seat of a Singapore cab, punchy after a 17-hour flight but rising to the challenge of the omnipresent camera, Anthony Bourdain gets a little silly about the odorous consequences of long-distance air travel combined with subpar airplane food. Bringing up one of his favorite whipping girls, his fellow Travel Channel host Samantha Brown, he grins like a schoolboy and delivers the zinger: “Sam Brown has an assistant who stands outside the bathroom and runs in and takes the blame.”

ArtsBeat

Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more.

Arts & Entertainment Guide

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

Optomen International/BBC

Gordon Ramsey in Thailand in a scene from his show “Gordon's Great Escape,” which ran this summer on BBC America.

It’s childish and mean, and it’s also illustrative of why Mr. Bourdain remains the best of the Americans abroad on TV: the professional voyagers, concentrated on the Travel Channel but also popping up in places like the Food Network and PBS, who have largely taken over the role travel and food writers once held in feeding our appetite for vicarious exoticism.

In “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations,” which was nominated for four Emmys this year in its seventh season (it lost for best nonfiction series to “American Masters” on PBS), and in his new series, “The Layover,” which begins Monday night on the Travel Channel, one of his accomplishments is to pay attention to the actual experience of travel — the getting to and from. His nighttime cab ride, which comes in the opening minutes of the “Layover” premiere, is not just an occasion for a cheap joke at Ms. Brown’s expense but also an honest illustration of what it’s like to disembark after a marathon flight, greasy, groggy, grouchy and hungry to boot.

This attention to the prosaic, something other hosts gloss over in their desire to focus, simply, cheaply and shallowly, on the weird or wonderful attributes of their destinations, is part of Mr. Bourdain’s larger television persona: smart, profane and sarcastic but, most important, real. Authenticity is the holy grail of reality TV, and he seems to project it effortlessly. Is it really real? Who knows. It’s entirely possible that Ms. Brown and the “Bizarre Foods” host Andrew Zimmern are more sincere in what they do than Mr. Bourdain; the lesson there would be that nothing looks less genuine on TV than actual sincerity.

He’s certainly playing a character, at least in part one compounded from classic notions of the introspective, rugged-intellectual voyager, drawn from movies and from the pages of Hemingway and Graham Greene and Paul Theroux. It seems, in retrospect, a natural for a television travel show. But Mr. Bourdain’s singular success in the role indicates just how much quick intelligence and hard work it takes to make that character viable and keep it from descending into self-parody (which has happened surprisingly seldom on “No Reservations”).

It is, if not easier, then at least a safer bet to take Ms. Brown’s all-American approach, the khaki-clad, cute as a button soccer mom who powers through her foreign itineraries with an iron will and a relentless, irritating energy. (Her most recent Travel Channel show was “Samantha Brown’s Asia” in 2010.) Even more reductive is the shtick of Mr. Zimmern, the channel’s bland Bourdain clone who has taken one aspect of Mr. Bourdain’s persona — his taste for organ meats and other uncommon edibles — and turned it into a franchise.

It’s probably inevitable that there will be an aspect of ugly-Americanism in any television show — reality, documentary, news, drama — that involves a camera crew, a few producer-researchers and a host crashing into a foreign country for a few days to assemble 30 or 60 minutes of TV. Mr. Bourdain and his shows are not immune to it, but in contrast to his channel mates he seems to start from a place of curiosity rather than spectacle or list checking, and his shows reflect a more genuine, if no less stage-managed, connection with the cultures he drops in on.

One host who exhibits some of the same open-mindedness and humor, along with a more genuinely modest and self-effacing attitude, is Zane Lamprey, who has done a series of alcohol-related shows on Fine Living, the Food Network and other cable channels. Also worth noting: “Gordon’s Great Escape,” which ran this summer on BBC America, and in which Gordon Ramsay applied the same brutalist approach to travel and food that he does to restaurants in his better-known shows.

Being honest doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t fudge the occasional detail. For instance Mr. Bourdain doesn’t mention in “The Layover” that the only way to get from New York to Singapore in 17 hours is to take Singapore Airlines’ nonstop flight from Newark, which is business-class only. For those of us who fly there regularly on our own dimes, it’s a two-leg trip of at least 22 hours.

For the fan of “No Reservations” who has a taste, or at least a tolerance, for Mr. Bourdain’s sometimes self-indulgent detours and occasionally soggy rhapsodizing, the concept of “The Layover” is not necessarily promising. It’s presented as a no-frills, highly formatted guide for those with a 24-to-48-hour layover in a given city. (That averages to 36 hours, which would be awfully reminiscent of a regular feature in the Travel section of The New York Times, but who’s counting.)

I’m surprised and pleased to report, though — as someone with a better-than-average knowledge of Singapore — that the premiere episode is as thorough, up-to-date and well-informed a report on the culinary life of an Asian destination as I can imagine an American television show delivering. There were a hundred things that could be quibbled with. (What was the cover charge for that bar table atop the Marina Bay Sands?) But overall it was good information, delivered with humor and flair and the occasional lively obscenity. If it didn’t have the jazzy, woolly character of “No Reservations,” it was still Mr. Bourdain and his team doing travel better than anyone else. And everyone has to grow up sometime.

Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Layover’ on Travel Channel - NYTimes.com

No comments:

Post a Comment