#53: I support the celeb travel show industrial complex
Death By Consumption
5/6/25 - 5/12/25
Does anyone have a luxurious house with a pool you're not using over Memorial Day weekend, and would you like to lend it to me? I just think that would be really nice. Sound off in the replies if you do!
This week: I shamelessly loved watching rich and famous people travel the world, I watched and read things set in the grimy old days of New York City before we became the kind of town where people regularly eat(?) and hang out(??) at Capitol One Cafes(????), I loved Lucy Sante's transition memoir, and I took another long walk to eat Central Asian food, like the cool kids are all doing.
Long Way Home, episodes 1+2 — Apple TV+
20 years ago, Ewan McGregor and his friend Charley Boorman drove motorcycles from London to New York the “long way round” — east, across all of Europe, Asia, and North America — and filmed it for a reality show/docuseries that permanently altered my brain and changed my life. Already fed on a steady diet of Survivor and Anthony Bourdain, which had primed me since I was a kid to want to get out of Wisconsin and start seeing the world, Long Way Round was the final impetus I needed to GTFO and start doing stupid shit out in the world.
There’s a direct line between Ewan and Charley getting on motorcycles in 2004, and me driving a rickshaw across India in 2013, or running a marathon in Pyongyang in 2016, or driving a motorcycle across Morocco in 2017. (And that direct line became a full circle when Charley Boorman showed up with the BBC in India, where I was doing the Rickshaw Run. Sadly he and I had minimal interactions, as he was much more interested in all the straight boys who could discuss engines with him; he pretty much lost interest in me when I admitted I had never so much as driven a manual car before, let alone a motorbike.) So the sudden arrival, on the always-neglected Apple TV+, of their fourth travel series, Long Way Home, was a very welcome surprise.
The first three series — Long Way Round, Long Way Down, and Long Way Up — were much more focused on routes with a specific and clear goal (getting from one end of the planet to the other, basically) and by this fourth one, they've clearly run out of ideas. The goal with this trip is to simply start at Ewan's home in Scotland, travel in a big loop around Europe, and end at Charley's house in England. It's a bit aimless, a bit silly, a bit of an obvious move to take a little holiday while getting paid by Apple to do so, but: I don't care. It's still just as fun to watch as it was 20 years ago.
You may feel differently if you don't have 20 years' worth of history with these guys (though I would recommend going back to watch their older series!), but the joy in the show is in watching their easy, casual friendship. They try their hardest to make each other laugh, skinny dip whenever they get a chance, and bicker and quickly make up in a way that only friends with decades of history do. If nothing else, it's a rare glimpse at how a mega-celebrity behaves when alone with his closest friend, lost in the middle of nowhere — watching Ewan in this feels a little like watching a panda released from the zoo it was raised in: oh look, it's so happy to be free! Is it going to die?
The biggest whiplash for me was in the first episode, when Ewan casually greets "Mary" — aka Mary Elizabeth Winstead, his new wife, with zero acknowledgement of his first wife, Eve, who was a big part of the previous series, even driving a motorcycle with him for a stretch of one of his trips (a demand of hers that provided some of the most drama of any of the series). Having exposed so much of the tension of his first marriage on his previous series, and having gone through a very public and messy divorce, it's no surprise that Ewan is clearly no longer willing to expose that part of his life beyond, essentially, a quick kiss goodbye for the cameras.
But I couldn't help but notice that Charley's wife of 30+ years, Olivia, who was very close with Ewan's first wife Eve in the first couple series, had zero on-camera interactions with Mary Elizabeth Winstead — does that mean Charley's wife is on Eve's side in the divorce? Is there tension between Charley's wife and Ewan? Has that resulted in tension between the boys themselves? I highly doubt they'll let us see any of that as the series progresses, but my nosy ass will keep my eagle eyes primed to catch even a hint of post-divorce mess. Look, Ewan, you invited me into your home, so now I'm going to dig through your underwear drawers, I'm sorry!
On the whole, the show feels anachronistic, as if it could have been made 20 years ago, in fact. It's a bit like watching a sitcom with a laugh track — they still make shows like this? It's a purely basic travel show, one in which you watch extremely rich people take a shameless holiday without ever once expressing guilt or making excuses for getting to do the things that you can't, and you know what? I don't care, it feels great! It's a true comfort watch, escapism at its finest, and if it feels pointless, that's kind of the whole point.
In fact, there's almost something refreshing about the brutal honesty of a TV show where the entire point is "a beautiful and rich celebrity takes a nice vacation." In a world saturated with charisma-less influencers clamoring to show you 5 bookstores you must visit in Stockholm or Abu Dhabi, Long Way Home isn't desperate for your attention, and it isn't screaming anything at you, in fact. Large portions of the show consist of watching Ewan and Charley riding their motorcycles over a bridge or through a field while saying things like, "Wow," and, "Isn't this nice?" while scored to the sounds of a generically bland coffee shop playlist. It's a show with no real message, no major point of view, no depth or pretensions or need for justification. Which makes it a televised breath of fresh air, and once the credits roll I guarantee you'll start searching for a flight to somewhere.
Conan O'Brien Must Go, season 2 episode 1: "Spain" — on MAX
If Long Way Home is a quiet, contemplative, just-plain-nice celebrity travel show, Conan O'Brien Must Go is its screaming, psychotic, deeply unwell evil twin. Ewan McGregor travels slowly across the world, earnestly trying to connect with everyone he meets along the way, while Conan flies to a new country and tries to cause as much mayhem as possible.
I'm so happy we got a second season of the show, and I'm even more excited that they're releasing it weekly, rather than dropping it all at once like the first season. We've successfully recruited Conan to our side in the war against binge watching! Now, we get to enjoy a weekly drop of Conan in a new country, terrorizing its residents, all in desperate need of a laugh, wherever he can get it.
This first episode, in Spain, has its ups and downs, as Conan tries any number of bits that may or may not land for you, but it's all worth it for the chance to see Javier Bardem acting like a total silly billy. I never knew he was so goofy! Not only is Javier game to do all the stupid shit Conan pushes him to do, but he regularly one-ups Conan, out-clowning the master in his own territory. They should make an Emmy for Best Guest Appearance in a Reality Show, just to give Javier an award for this episode (unfortunately, he'd ultimately lose the award to the woman, from this week's episode of The Rehearsal, who said she got wet reading an Einstein biography — this Emmy category would be tough competition!).
Celebrities traveling the world: who knew it could be so fun! And the thing is, celebrities are going on vacation all the time, without us getting to see it. So it's nice that at least a few of the charming ones have decided to invite a camera crew along for the ride. We can't have wealth redistribution, but we can still be nosy. As far as I'm concerned, Ewan, Conan, and Stanley Tucci doing his thing in Italy are not enough; we need many, many more of these shows. Why can't Gwyneth take us along to St. Tropez? Let's put Meryl and Martin Short on a cruise ship with a camera crew! I can think of at least 100 more celebrities whose travel shows I would happily tune in for. (But don't get any ideas, Kardashians, we are NOT interested.)
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) — on Criterion
I did not expect the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three to have this wacky of a tone. It straddles the rare line between thriller and comedy, without ever going too far into either. (The funniest part, actually, is unintentional: the hijackers revealing their big demand: [Austin Powers voice:] one MILLION dollars!) Most of the comedy comes purely from the dialogue, which feels funny in an organically New Yorky way — every single character is blunt, brassy, and a little bit annoyed at being held up at gunpoint. The film is essentially two hours of thick-accented men insulting each other while trying to solve various crises, and I was endlessly entertained by it. Straight men used to be so charming!
Low Life, by Lucy Sante (1991) — paperback
This book, Lucy Sante's classic history of the seedier side of late 19th and early 20th century New York City, is absolutely packed with interesting tidbits. Honestly, nearly every paragraph could be a book itself — it absolutely whips through gangland murders, the rise and fall of gambling empires, the increasing popularity of various street drugs, and, honestly, it can all be a lot to take in.
I have no idea how much of it I retained (probably not much, if I'm being honest), but a few facts stuck in my brain permanently, I can feel. I had no idea the classic New York accent started as an accent specific to the Bowery neighborhood, but now it's a thing I can't forget, for all the good that info will do me. Nor, for that matter, did I know that the word "joint" comes from the opium trade, due to opium pipes originally being made from jointed bamboo stalks. (I'm excited to mentally return to this little piece of trivia every time I smoke a joint, now, imagining I'm in some glamorously seedy opium den, rather than my own living room, watching housewives scream at each other.)
As with any history book, of course, a lot of the interest is in discovering how much things haven't changed. I particularly enjoyed this little paragraph, describing a new way to scam people in the late 1800s:
This involved stringing the mark along over a period of days, convincing him that he was getting in on the ground floor of an enterprise making quick money by defrauding others, getting him to pour substantial and increasing amounts of cash into the operation, with the idea that the more he put in, the more he could extract, and then, when all his liquid resources were exhausted, quickly lowering the boom and skipping town. These cons were as complex and as highly organized as any legitimate business, and they involved a network of connections oiled by graft that in a smaller city might take in the whole police department and most of the municipal administration. Although one might expect such games to flourish largely in the more pliable provincial towns, there were important stores in New York which were protected by the ever-corruptible cops and politicians.
Is that not describing, essentially, Trump and/or the Hawk Tuah girl's recent crypto scams? For that matter, is that not how the entire crypto industry works? This nation is just scams all the way down!
I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, by Lucy Sante (2024) — hardcover
Went straight from Lucy Sante's major history book to her most recent book, a memoir of her late-in-life transition. This is a very short, very breezy memoir, one that feels as if she wrote it purely for herself, to help her figure out her own thoughts. The book starts with the email Lucy sent to 30 of her closest friends, announcing she was trans at the age of 67 (she insists throughout the book that she lives a solitary, very lonely life, but I kept going back to that number — you think you don't have friends, but when you wanted to tell your closest friends you were trans you had a list of thirty people? Girl...). From there, the book goes back and forth, as we track her upbringing, youth, marriages, and career, in parallel with all the messy business of transitioning in your late 60s.
It's a tricky thing, a memoir written by a very private person, and far too often in the book I felt I was bumping up against Lucy's walls, where she'd suddenly pull back and end a scene before we got to the real emotions of it. What was interesting, though, was that she was way more open with the post-coming-out details, whereas parts of her past she seems to want to keep hidden — either from us, or from herself.
But she's a beautiful writer, so the book is moving even when it's frustrating. Her turns of phrases are just so lovely, like when she memorably describes losing her faith as, "Religion fell off me, with the sudden mass speed of snow off a tin roof." And, even though it's a very specific memoir of a very specific coming-out, she articulates a feeling I know myself all too well, and I think many people who were once in a closet of sorts would relate to:
How can my “egg” have “cracked” sixty-odd years after I first “knew”? The answer is that throughout that time I was engaged in a complex dance of knowledge and denial. … I acted at all times as if other people were peering into my head, inspecting me for faults. I was exercising deniability, and the best way to assure that was to lie to myself. When my egg cracked I simply stopped being able to lie to myself.
There's nothing groundbreaking in that — it's a sentiment I think millions of us have felt, in various ways. But it's nice to see it so plainly, especially from someone who came to the realization much later than most of us, thankfully, do. A lot of memoirs feel like cash grabs, like a person from the headlines trying to get more headlines, but this felt like a book written because someone needed to write it, and I think it's also a book that more than a few people will find they needed to have read.
Dry fried noodles — at Laghman Express, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn
Took another long walk, deep into Brooklyn with our friend Zach this weekend, this time with Laghman Express as a destination. This teeny tiny little restaurant ( mercifully far from the West Village girlies' territory), which was on the NYTimes' best 100 restaurants in the city last year, was worth every step. We sat outside under a glorious breeze and dove into plate after plate of Uyghur food, which mostly means a lot of lamb and cumin, in different ways. All of it was truly spectacular, but the standout were the dry fried noodles, which were hand-pulled, thick and chewy, with a rich taste of char and spice. I'd walk 4 miles down there just for those noodles alone.
We've really been on a Central Asian kick lately, and I think I'm ready to declare it Silk Road Summer! All the cool kids are throwing our their ZYNs and replacing them with MANTI. Put down the K and do a bump of CUMIN. I really think I'm onto something major here.