'Tony' Gives Anthony Bourdain the Anti-Biopic Treatment

The Tony trailer has arrived, and we cannot know for sure what Anthony Bourdain would have thought of the young-Anthony-Bourdain movie it's promoting. In order to even debate whether Tony—I call him “Tony,” because I am a slightly annoying dude who is between the age of thirty and fifty so even though we never met or interacted in any way I believe that he was my friend—would liked the idea of someone making a movie like Tony, we have to imagine a world in which Bourdain is alive today, and in order to imagine that we have to imagine a world in which Bourdain coexisted with The Bear. I don’t know what he would have thought of The Bear but I bet he would never have shut up about it. He would have brought back blogging in order to blog about it. They would probably have had him on as a guest star at some point—but could Bourdain have played “Tony Bourdain” on The Bear, a show that feels unimaginable without him and his celebration of the salutary mercilessness of the restaurant kitchen, or would the set have collapsed in on itself, along with space and time? This too, we cannot know.