10 September 2015

The Best Show on the TeeVee

If you're not watching "Parts Unknown" on CNN, you're a moron. It's, hands down, the best show on the TeeVee. Bourdain's first one, on FoodTV, "Cook's Tour" was 30 minutes and OK; the snark was there from the start. It was mostly a food show.

He then moved to Travel Channel for "No Reservations", and began to find his footing. In August, 2006 there was supposed to be an episode on Beirut, but a couple of days in to the visit, Israel beat the shit out of the city, along with Bourdain and his crew. If you missed it then, Travel Channel still repeats it on occasion. You must find it. What we got was reportage, and the episode got an Emmy nomination. Should have won.

Thence on to CNN and "Parts Unknown", and the reason for this short epistle. My homepage, for the nonce, is CBS News, and it announces that heroin has invaded white America, specifically Vermont. A year late and a dollar short. Bourdain did that last year.
"Like a lot of our shows it's a stealth program -- it claims to be about one thing and it's actually about another," he says. "... In [preparing] for this show I noticed there's been this incredible explosion of heroin use in rural Massachusetts and New Hampshire and Vermont -- small, white, rural, small-town, Norman Rockwell America. No criminal gangs, no outside posses coming in, nothing like that, [but] little Timmy next door is a dope fiend now. And so is mom and grandma. On heroin, the worst drug in the world. How did that happen? So we started to look into it."

It's season 4, episode 8 "Massachusetts". Again, go find it.

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