This year, Emmy nominees for Outstanding Nonfiction Series include Stanley Tucci: In Search of Italy (winner of 2021 and 2022) and Taste the nation with Padma Lakshmi. It’s fair to say that these foodie travelogues owe their entry into the awards race to Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknownwhich dominated the category in the 2010s and brought credibility to food programming in a previously overlooked field.
CNN unknown partswhich won 12 Primetime Emmys in 12 seasons, including six for Outstanding Informative Series (as the category was known from 2013 to 2019), was Bourdain’s fourth series after a cook’s tour and Anthony Bourdain: No reservations on Travel Channel and Food Network the scale. They were all travel shows presented through the prism of food, but in unknown partsBourdain, an executive chef at New York’s Brasserie Les Halles who rose to fame for his eye-opening memoirs. Cooking Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly — delved into topics beyond the reach of tourism as he explored remote locations, from Myanmar to Massachusetts, from Lagos to Detroit. “With (unknown parts), I invest myself in every detail. It’s my story from start to finish, and it’s very personal,” she said. THR in 2014 (on the right). For example, “It looks at my path to heroin and it parallels what’s really going on in small town New England, which is this amazing explosion of heroin use.” Other episodes revealed real life around the world: “When you ask (‘What’s for dinner?’) in Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Congo, you get very surprising, nuanced and complex answers that open people up.” Bourdain explained. . The series proved to be a hit for CNN, earning No. 1 in the Sunday 9 p.m. time slot on cable news for its first three seasons. Bourdain was filming season 12 in Strasbourg, France when he committed suicide in June 2018. He won two posthumous Emmy Awards for unknown partsfor Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Informational Series.
This story first appeared in an independent August issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, Click here for subscribe.
