In the resplendent green of Costa Rica, a peak reaches toward the clouds. Eugene Levy gazes up at it in awe. “That’s a volcano,” his host explains, adding that it last erupted about 10 years ago. Levy looks unsettled. “I was hoping it would be more dormant,” he says. The understated delivery is classic Levy, but it feels different, less endearing, in this context. The premise of Apple TV+’s “The Reluctant Traveler” is that the celebrity actor hasn’t liked to travel in the past, but is now pushing himself out of his comfort zone with televised trips to places like Finland, Italy and Japan. With that, he joins an increasingly established subgenre: the celebrity travel show. Netflix has “Down to Earth With Zac Efron.” TBS had Conan O’Brien’s “Conan Without Borders.” CNN had “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” which was both a celebrity travel show and a celebrity food show — another thriving subgenre, with entries from Selena Gomez, Amy Schumer, Jon Favreau and Paris Hilton.
The idea behind these programs is the same as ever: You settle in and watch your host learn about new places. It’s just that, in these shows, it’s the host’s very celebrity that inevitably becomes the star around which everything revolves. Consider Levy and that Costa Rican peak: You’re offered one moment to admire a beautiful scene before the active volcano becomes the setup for celebrity quipping. The shows’ stars can rarely help drawing attention this way, whether it’s with solemn head-nodding or relentless cleverness. O’Brien, traveling in Armenia, is so shameless in his pursuit of laughs that he almost seems to embarrass his Armenian-American assistant. Stanley Tucci, eating cantucci in Florence, has to remark that “anything that ends in ‘tucci,’ I like.” The celebrity travelogue doubles as proof of just how hard it is for performers to subordinate themselves to their surroundings.
The point of featuring celebrities seems obvious enough; in a crowded TV market, a familiar host can lure people to watch a new show. The trade-off, of course, is that the format and subject matter — whether travel or food or, say, home renovation — will find itself drifting toward the formal demands of a reality show, sacrificing its capacity to inform to its host’s own shtick or charisma. The things we see must serve the narratives and characters of the stars, providing opportunities to play to or against their images, drawing out their particular moods or charms. A result is a suffocating and often superficial take on how fascinating or delicious everything is. Eventually you come to suspect that each show would feel functionally identical no matter where you sent the celebrity — that Stanley Tucci could tour America’s bowling alleys, or Zac Efron could sample Midwestern diners, or vice versa, without much changing. This is happening across the TV world: What used to be meaningfully informative programming, delivered by personable but only tangentially notable hosts, is gradually being swallowed up by celebrity.
I still remember the first time I traveled abroad, and the feeling I had emerging from the Paris-Nord train station to behold one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It made me feel alien and bracingly helpless. I was an outsider. That was the whole point of my being there. That decentered feeling never really went away, neither on that trip nor on later ones. I wouldn’t want it to.
Celebrity travel shows tend to evoke something close to the opposite of that feeling. This is not to say that you can’t learn anything from them. It’s just that the celebrity at the center will generally steal the spotlight from the locale itself. Levy, interestingly enough, seems to exhibit some self-awareness about this phenomenon; per his show’s premise, he seems, at times, to progress from fear of travel to an embrace of travel’s helplessness. In southern Utah, he spends time with his guide in the quiet of night, discussing the stars and the spirituality of the desert. It’s a striking contrast to your typical celebrity fare, in that it seems to capture Levy giving himself over to the unfamiliar in a strikingly vulnerable way.
But it’s fleeting. The show has Levy spending a lot of time at luxury hotels, where fame affords him deferential treatment. Earlier in the Utah episode, he spends breakfast chatting with a chef (who is making one very elevated pancake) about whether he’s ever cooked for Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Much of the series revolves around this kind of celebrity-centric riffing. The show’s entire premise, after all, revolves around Levy’s own experiences and hang-ups, not the curiosities of a viewer or a would-be traveler. Offered “crocodile schnitzel” at Kruger National Park in South Africa, Levy tells his guide, “I’m going to enjoy watching you eat that,” and quips that he’ll just take a vodka-tonic. In Lisbon, his guide tells him the Portuguese people like to explore the world, and asks if Levy does, too. The actor says that “adventure is my middle name,” and that world exploration is “in my nature,” but he’s then seen confessing his deceit to the camera: “That’s where acting comes in. You know, when you can hide ineptitude on a scale like that, give me an Oscar.” He is traveling as a character in his own travel series, all while ostensibly trying to break free from that character’s limitations and experience new places — which he can never quite do, because the show is ultimately about the character, not the places.
Travel stories have often benefited from a guide, from Matsuo Bashō’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” in the 17th century to Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” or Pico Iyer’s “The Lady and the Monk” in the 20th to Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown” in the 21st. (Bourdain became a celebrity, but he had a curiosity and humility, an authenticity in his travels that could make him feel like he wasn’t.) These figures serve as proxies and narrators and cultural synthesizers, both standing in for us and offering us their impressions. When we come to trust them, it’s often precisely because they know how to step out of the way and help us engage with the places they’re exploring. The same goes for any other topic. We know names like “Julia Child” and “Bob Ross” because of how compellingly those people served their subjects, not because of their pre-existing star power. And, I suppose, because nobody at the time thought to develop “Learning to Paint With Mr. T.”
I’m inclined to say the ideal travel show would merely be a video montage with someone reading a guidebook over it. The less narrative basis, the better. “Rick Steves’ Europe” and “Big City, Little Budget,” with Oneika Raymond, may be two series that come closest to that ideal, in that they’re basically video guidebooks. The hosts subordinate themselves to the places they visit. They aim to show people why to travel, and what it’s like — not to entertain them along the way.
Not so today. In one episode of “The Reluctant Traveler,” Levy visits the Maldives, where he meets a local who seems eager to dispense some wisdom. “You really need to connect — remove your shoes, feel the sand,” he tells Levy, as the camera shows his bare feet and Levy’s footwear. You get the distinct feeling he’s saying this, in part, because it’s what Levy wants to hear. Still: Point taken. To center the place, you must decenter yourself. In travel, as in all things, fame is a distraction.
Source photograph (Levy): Maarten De Boer/Contour by Getty Images.
Nicholas Cannariato is a writer living in Chicago. He last wrote about common birds for the magazine.
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