The TV Show Anthony Bourdain Wished He Could Make
Anthony Bourdain wasn't always a cool cat in front of a camera. His producers, Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia — who convinced him to do television, to begin with — revealed in a new documentary, "Road Runner" that they thought they'd made a mistake when they landed in Japan and started filming "A Cook's Tour." Bourdain was camera shy and often terse. He'd never truly traveled before, either.
And yet, televised entertainment quickly became Bourdain's career. At first, t.v. series were, perhaps, primarily a means to make ends meet. "That was always my thought," says Bourdain in Roadrunner footage. "That if I get enough money, I'd like to live like a normal person". But for Bourdain, being in front of a camera soon became as natural for him as breathing. From "A Cook's Tour" to "Parts Unknown" to "No Reservations," — from Japan to Thailand to Antarctica to the French Alps; from Havana to Jamaica to Myanmar to Russia (via Lonely Planet) — the road and the camera consumed him. After Bourdain's suicide, a source told People, "It was as if he gave everything to his work and then had nothing, zero, left for himself afterwards."
There was one show, however, that escaped the beloved and irreverent star of the culinary world.
The show Anthony Bourdain would have made in an 'ideal world'
If Anthony Bourdain began his career squirmish in front of a camera, he ended it that way, too. In "Roadrunner," his crew and co-workers recount a turning point in Bourdain's life, one in which he admitted to becoming agoraphobic. The places Bourdain wanted to travel to changed as deserts and the deserted became more and more appealing to the culinary idol. Bourdain told Eater in 2016, "To climb a dune in the Egyptian desert and look out over the desert as the moon's rising, surrounded by friends that I work with, a belly full of some food that no one outside that time zone ever gets to experience, that's a 'pinch me' moment for sure."
And while Bourdain spent the second half of his life starring in t.v. shows (shows that per USA Today, made him into a millionaire) he would have been absent from the show he wanted to make. "He often talked about how in an ideal world he wouldn't be in the show," director Tom Vitale revealed in "Roadrunner." Vitale continued: "It would be his point of view, like a camera moving through space without having to see him at all."