In new Apple TV+ reality series The Reluctant Traveler, Eugene Levy takes a trip around the world to face his anxieties and fears. And we get to tag along and see a little bit of how people who aren’t famous actors live.
The 75-year-old Levy, who starred in Schitt’s Creek after years of work on SCTV, wants to see the international sights before he gets a little too infirm to do so. The occasionally quite charming series, which takes Levy to a new exotic locale each episode, won’t change your life. But it’s fun to watch, and an easy enough way to while away an afternoon while you’re stuck at home.
The Reluctant Traveler review
Season 1: A veteran comedian and actor, Eugene Levy’s face is one that most Americans and Canadians know by heart, thanks in part to the bushy eyebrows and signature round spectacles. What he isn’t, we’ll come to learn over the course of the first season of The Reluctant Traveler, is an extrovert.
As he takes pains to point out, Levy doesn’t take risks. He doesn’t explore. He hates leaving his comfort zone, which basically includes his house, every now and again a film set, and the golf course. It does not include Finnish lodges or Costa Rican tent hotels in the shadow of a volcano.
For the Apple TV+ travel show, Levy’s been set up to do things wildly outside of his usual itineraries. He goes on safari, enjoys some ice fishing, moderates sumo wrestling, and is taken on a tour of a jungle filled with poisonous vermin. In every case, Levy eventually finds the things about these places, from Utah to The Maldives, that make them home to some of the most contented people on earth.
There’s more to life than the creature comforts Levy has secured for himself. And he’s out to find them and appreciate them before it’s too late.
Comedy legend Eugene Levy deserves a taste of the good life
Photo: Apple TV+
Levy is a legend, no two ways about it. Even his recent ubiquity can’t take that away from him. The car insurance commercials, the way the charming good nature of Schitt’s Creek became memed to death and stopped feeling like the little show that could and more like an inescapable force, the fact that his son Dan is everywhere now … none of that is enough to sully his reputation.
Levy was a comedian of rare skill and dexterity who came to prominence in the 1970s when he became a cast member of the unspeakably funny cult comedy series SCTV along with such legends as John Candy, Rick Moranis, Martin Short and his Schitt’s Creek co-star Catherine O’Hara. He was always funny on the Canadian sketch comedy show, whether it was doing mightily specific impressions of the likes of Alex Trebek or Gene Shalit or original creations Stan Schmenge, Woody Tobias Jr. or Brian Johns.
If you grew up with SCTV like I did, you learned to look the other way when Levy started paying the bills with direct-to-video American Pie sequels. He’d earned the right to coast in movies a rickety rung above pornography if anyone had. He made my parents laugh for years, and then he made me laugh. Through it all, he never ever seemed to be above it all or to lose his spark. He can do whatever he wants.
A homebody hits the road
Photo: Apple TV+
And that, we must say — and Levy himself admits it in the opening narration — includes The Reluctant Traveler. Why not get paid to go exotic places where even a homebody nebbish like Levy can’t help but enjoy himself? Levy’s not going overtime to deliver punchlines, which mostly seem to be written by other folks in the narration. But his consternation during his expeditionary voyages to far-flung places can be very funny, as when he makes a small child his nemesis during his Finnish excursion.
If, like me, you found Levy’s frustration with John Hemphill’s Bob Currie to be the funniest bits of Schitt’s Creek, that’s the basic idea here. Levy effectively plays God’s straight man as warthogs, alligators, spiders and floodwaters assail him day after day.
Of course, the truth of every travel show, no matter how “reluctant” the host, is that these people are seeing, hearing, doing and eating things the rest of us can only dream about. Levy can talk a big a game about his discomfort. However, we know he’s in five-star hotels being served incredible booze and food by the friendliest people on earth.
There’s very little tension here. So you buy into the fiction that he’s hating life on the road because you, too, want to see the things he gets up to. Don’t we all? A little of Levy does occasionally bring this eight-episode series out of the doldrums of your typically depressing travel show. (Depressing as in: Why the hell am I stuck on my couch reviewing TV instead of enjoying 5-star meals in Venice? Oh right … because I’m not rich and famous.)
But this is not much more than you were likely expecting. I’m happy Levy’s enjoying himself, and that’s plenty.
★★★☆☆
Watch The Reluctant Traveler on Apple TV+
You can now watch the entire first season of The Reluctant Traveler on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-PG
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
