Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown Will Say Goodbye with One Final Season
LAURA BRADLEY at Vanity Fair
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/08/anthony-bourdain-parts-unknown-final-season-cnn/amp?__twitter_impression=true
"SNIP........
(Only one episode) That installment, then, will be the only one to feature Bourdain’s traditional voice-over narration; the rest will include narration from the episodes’ other participants. And the final two episodes of the season will abandon the usual formula altogether, focusing instead on how the show was made and the indelible footprint Bourdain left behind.
Speaking with the Times, CNN’s executive vice president for talent and content, Amy Entelis,stressed the importance of Bourdain’s legacy—not just at the network he called home for five years, but to his fans. “People said, ‘I was afraid to travel before I watched the show,’ ‘I followed his route,’ ‘I was an addict and I connected with Tony and now I’m fine,’” Entelis said of the responses the network received following Bourdain’s death. “Others were angry that he’s not in the world anymore. It’s an incredible outpouring. A lot of people are experiencing what we are.”
Unlike previous seasons, which comprised 8-10 episodes, Parts Unknown’s final chapter will run for only 7. The first episode, which finds Bourdain traveling to Kenya with his CNN colleague W. Kamau Bell, was the only one completed before Bourdain’s death. Four others—set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Indonesia, Spain’s mountainous Asturias region, and Texas’s “Big Bend” area, which borders Mexico—completed filming. The directors who filmed those episodes will oversee their completion, using audio Bourdain gathered during filming as well as follow-up interviews with others involved in shooting the episodes.
The final two episodes of the season will abandon the usual format entirely: instead of focusing on a location, they will serve as a retrospective of the series itself. The penultimate episode, the Timesreports, will offer fans a behind-the-scenes look at how Parts Unknown was made, complete with outtakes and interviews with Bourdain’s cast and crew. And the series finale will turn its lens toward, as Entelis put it, “how Tony affected the world”—with reactions from fans as well as Bourdain’s friends and travel buddies, some of whom we’ve met on Parts Unknown over the years. Capturing Bourdain’s legacy will be quite a feat—but faced with the near-insurmountable task, it seems CNN is prepared to honor its star as well as anyone could.
........SNIP"
