The Reluctant Traveler: Eugene Levy Leaves His Comfort Zone

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

Canadian star Eugene Levy stars in The Reluctant Traveler, an eight-episode Apple TV+ travel series now airing, and he’s a good-humoured companion.

The trips involve brief luxury and adventure vacations in Finland and Tokyo, Venice, Lisbon, Costa Rica, South Africa, the Maldives, and the Utah desert. There’s nothing novel or ambitious here: the cinematography is attractive and the hotels are absurdly expensive and unusual. But mostly the series offers welcome late-winter escapism. Think The White Lotus without the flouncing and anxiety.

Levy, now 75, has an extraordinary resumé as a writer-performer that includes the recent triumph of Schitt’s Creek, SCTV, the four movies he co-wrote with Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration) and the American Pie film series. But he has always tended to be the guy with the Groucho eyebrows to the side of the group portrait, not at the centre.

In The Reluctant Traveler, he’s the slightly flustered star of the show. In the words of his SCTV character, Bobby Bittman, he’s “speaking seriously as a comedian.” The largely unscripted humour is conversational and incidental and there’s no attempts to make anyone uncomfortable except himself.

According to Levy in interviews, he was initially approached by Apple TV+ producers, who presumably thought it would be fun to have Johnny Rose, fictional proprietor of the run-down Rosebud Motel on Schitt’s Creek, visit grand hotels around the world. Levy attempted to explain why, as a neurotic homebody, he was exactly wrong person for the job.

The producers came back with the idea that his reluctance would become the premise of the show. The hotels cost four figures a night and are usually unique —on stilts, in a palace, on a train trestle, a sandstone campus in a desert. In each case, Levy seems uncomfortably impressed by the luxury, but even more squeamish about leaving the hotel room for the country outside.

While other shows titillate audiences with guests who eat bugs or are dumped into the jungle, The Reluctant Traveler is more about whether Levy will try sushi for the first time, walk across a suspension bridge or dip his toes in the Indian ocean.

Each episode begins with an introduction, including a quote attributed to “a great philosopher” that “The world is a book, and those who don’t travel read only one page.” To which Levy responds, “I’ve read a few pages and I’m not crazy about the book.”

At the start, we see Levy apparently teleported to a remote location, in his new location, looking worried, carrying a small beige suitcase, which is clearly a prop, given his number of spiffy clothing changes in each episode. Soon after his voice-over introduction, he’s met by a friendly, talkative guide in a skidoo, sea plane, helicopter or jeep, who takes him from his lodging for an uncomfortable but ultimately rewarding adventure.

That might be experiencing a simulated monsoon in Japan, driving a dogsled in Lapland, extracting dung from the butt of an elephant in South Africa, or coming face-to-face with a lethal “eyelash viper” in the Costa Rican jungle at night.

I doubt if The Reluctant Traveler would meet the highest standards of ethical tourism, but the series touches on issues of reforestation, endangered species, respect for Indigenous people’s lands and right. It also shows how tourism provides livelihoods for a lot of ordinary people.

There’s a point in each episode where Levy engages in a conversation or interview with a local craftsperson or guide. They share food and drink and talk about the things in life that money can’t buy: family, friends, food, a sense of inner peace in each of its local iterations, such as Japanese zen, Finnish “sui” (resistance) or Costa Rican “pura vida,” or the simple life.

The contrast between coddled leisure and hard work is typified in the episode where Levy tentatively eats a dessert in edible gold foil in a Venice restaurant. “I can understand eating 24 carrots, but eating gold is a whole other thing.”

After, he visits the venerable family workshop where the foil is made and takes a turn wielding the mallet, hammering the gold leaf into a delicacy for those with a taste for excess.

The Reluctant Traveler. With Eugene Levy. All eight episodes of the series are available on Apple TV + from Feb. 24.