Stanley Tucci: the flirty TV foodie hero you need in your life
You may not realize it at the moment, but your heart cried for a series like Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy. If you saw last night's first episode hidden on CNN International, you already know that. If you haven't, stop what you're doing and look for it. It's less a TV show and more an hour of full body relaxation. By the end of the episode, I felt like my whole brain had been extracted and massaged in olive oil.
Although the title suggests a different series, in which a beloved actor receives a concussion and then desperately tries to navigate Google Maps, it's actually a culinary travel diary. Tucci visits a different Italian region in each episode and happily tastes its food. It's a formula you've seen a thousand times before, but with a few key differences.
The first is its timing. In Search of Italy was filmed last summer, in that almost mythical lull when Covid subsided and people were again briefly allowed out of their homes. Thus, the whole series is perpetually dazzled by the possibility of travel. Every restaurant, every mountain, every cobbled street is captured with a sense of amazed wonder, as if it were a newly rediscovered treasure. That it is broadcast now, when we are still not allowed to go abroad, only exacerbates this feeling. If you've missed European travel a bit in the past 15 months, you're going to feel this spectacle in your bones.
The second difference is its host. Shows like this tend to be limited in scope. There are only a limited number of times you can watch a tomato farm or visit a lemon orchard. As such, they are highly dependent on the personality of whoever is in front of the camera. Anthony Bourdain's shows were laced with a spirit of adventure, for example, while Phil Rosenthal's are like watching a sugar-crazed toddler go wild in a supermarket. But Searching for Italy has Stanley Tucci, for crying out loud, a man who can't help but exude an elegant calm from his pores.
Tucci, from l everyone's opinion, had a pandemic. Early on, he became a viral star, thanks to videos of him making cocktails in his kitchen. There was something about his unflappable presentation – teasing but authoritative – that not only cut through the chaos of those early months, but inspired wave after wave of fierce desire in nearly everyone who watched it. And then, if that wasn't enough, last May he wrote an hour-by-hour breakdown of life in lockdown for The Atlantic that was perhaps the first compelling summary of family life in lockdown. . If Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy had been made before the lockdown, if it had been the guy with the Hunger Games wig eating risotto on a bench, it would have been fine. But this is the sexy new and improved post-viral Tucci. As such, his show is unmissable.
You may not realize it at the moment, but your heart cried for a series like Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy. If you saw last night's first episode hidden on CNN International, you already know that. If you haven't, stop what you're doing and look for it. It's less a TV show and more an hour of full body relaxation. By the end of the episode, I felt like my whole brain had been extracted and massaged in olive oil.
Although the title suggests a different series, in which a beloved actor receives a concussion and then desperately tries to navigate Google Maps, it's actually a culinary travel diary. Tucci visits a different Italian region in each episode and happily tastes its food. It's a formula you've seen a thousand times before, but with a few key differences.
The first is its timing. In Search of Italy was filmed last summer, in that almost mythical lull when Covid subsided and people were again briefly allowed out of their homes. Thus, the whole series is perpetually dazzled by the possibility of travel. Every restaurant, every mountain, every cobbled street is captured with a sense of amazed wonder, as if it were a newly rediscovered treasure. That it is broadcast now, when we are still not allowed to go abroad, only exacerbates this feeling. If you've missed European travel a bit in the past 15 months, you're going to feel this spectacle in your bones.
The second difference is its host. Shows like this tend to be limited in scope. There are only a limited number of times you can watch a tomato farm or visit a lemon orchard. As such, they are highly dependent on the personality of whoever is in front of the camera. Anthony Bourdain's shows were laced with a spirit of adventure, for example, while Phil Rosenthal's are like watching a sugar-crazed toddler go wild in a supermarket. But Searching for Italy has Stanley Tucci, for crying out loud, a man who can't help but exude an elegant calm from his pores.
Tucci, from l everyone's opinion, had a pandemic. Early on, he became a viral star, thanks to videos of him making cocktails in his kitchen. There was something about his unflappable presentation – teasing but authoritative – that not only cut through the chaos of those early months, but inspired wave after wave of fierce desire in nearly everyone who watched it. And then, if that wasn't enough, last May he wrote an hour-by-hour breakdown of life in lockdown for The Atlantic that was perhaps the first compelling summary of family life in lockdown. . If Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy had been made before the lockdown, if it had been the guy with the Hunger Games wig eating risotto on a bench, it would have been fine. But this is the sexy new and improved post-viral Tucci. As such, his show is unmissable.
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