Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown airs on CNN and uses culinary tourism as the gateway drug to learning more about the historical, sociological, financial and political issues that people in the episode’s featured area faces. Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown features more in depth journalistic integrity than the average news program.
For example, in an episode on Libya, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown not only features the culinary delights of the area, but focuses on the ordinary revolutionaries that killed Qaddafi. Long before it hit the average American’s radar, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown focused on the autocratic plague spreading from Russia and Turkey. Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown explores countries with little to no tourist attraction because they are rarely filmed or worse, ignored such as Myanmar or Iran. In the Congo episode, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown unwittingly may reveal what the United States will look like when the federal government abandons its duties to its citizens as the infrastructure crumbles and a stalwart few struggle to support it. In Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown’s Massachusetts episode, Bourdain empathetically explores how people are suffering from the opioid crisis while simultaneously deriding the hypocrisy of those who only care because the victims remind them of themselves.
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown also explores more luxurious locales such as different regions in France and Eastern Asia, but unlike his earlier shows like Anthony Bourdain: A Cook’s Tour, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, The Layover and The Taste, which were primarily interested in the tourist experience or were just another food reality TV show, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown is more comprehensive and focuses on the people. I have seen the first six out of nine seasons of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, and I think that it is his best series to date.
Bourdain is using his platform to ask difficult questions while having a good time even when his questions indict his particular brand of tourism, colonialism or prejudice. Bourdain gives the impression that if he makes a mistake, he can learn from it and teach others from his experience as opposed to being defensive and needing reassurance. The revolution may not be televised, but if it is, it will be by Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown or at least the TV series will be there right before or after it occurs.