I have had a hard time watching Anthony Bourdain’s award-winning show “Parts Unknown” since his death because there is an added slickness and self-aggrandizement to these latest episodes, with each advertisement proclaiming a declaration of how great his life was as they hawk their product. In other words, thanks for all of the money you made for us, dude. It’s too bad it can’t continue.
I know this seems a bit callous, but I am going to let you in on exactly why I feel this way. I am a technology professional that works for a large consulting company. I have been a geek for 20 years now. About 4 years ago, I was working for a large client, a very demanding and very large client. The year before my company and I arrived, some bad things happened and they brought us in to help them recover. Now, the bad thing that happened was entirely self-inflicted. I won’t bore you with details, but my company helped fix it and now the client was doing everything they could to regain the market share they had lost the previous year, and my company really wanted a big piece of that.
There I was, in the midst of this newly created maelstrom. I was tasked with a project that would make some things more efficient. I succeeded on this one. Then came another project. I was in the middle of that project when I was pulled onto another one. All the while, I wasn’t given the kind of support I needed to be able to succeed. What made matters worse was that the client still was using the other (competing) consulting company that got it into trouble the year before. This other company kept missing deadlines that I needed them to meet so that I could get my work done. However, when they missed their date, the timeline was not expanded by the client, which left me a much shorter amount of time to try to get this work done. Nothing was moving. There I was alone and getting requests from all over. I realized that I was in a pretty bad hole. I drank gallons of coffee staying up late at night to try to fix things. I wasn’t sleeping for fear that I would fail and possibly get fired. With all of this, I broke.
During a meeting where one of my supervisors started to chide me for not getting what I needed to get done that Monday (in other words, why didn’t I work throughout the weekend and finish it), I exploded. I started yelling and screaming that I had no support and there was no way that I was going to make it. Luckily, I was working from home. If I had been onsite, I have no idea what I would have done.
I hung up the phone and started screaming all over my house. Luckily, my wife was home at the time, but I scared the bejesus out of her. I ranted and raved. I wanted to kill people. I was crying uncontrollably. That’s when she called a local suicide hotline. After a few hours of not returning calls from my superiors and a little time spent with the counselors that stopped by my house to assess me, I was taken to a psych ward because of homicidal and suicidal tendencies that I was showing. I was a hot mess.
That 72 hours opened up my eyes as to what kind of world that I work in and what it was doing to me. I wonder if Mr. Bourdain was going through something worse. Looking back, my problems were nothing compared to what he was probably going through.
Network news is a cauldron. Edward R. Murrow foresaw this in 1958. The first scene of George Clooney’s wonderful film, “Goodnight and Good Luck” starring David Strathairn as Murrow is as relevant today as it was then. Here is that speech.
x YouTube VideoThere is also a great article on this from The Guardian by Stephen Barnett in 2008, the 50th anniversary of this speech. He ends it with this…
Fifty years after Murrow's speech, this may be the time to dust down his words and shout them out again; because the forces that turned American television journalism into another branch of show business are gathering steam over here.
”Ed Murrow: a voice from the past with lessons for today's news broadcasters” The Guardian, 10/15/2008, Stephen Barnett.
We have found that Anthony Bourdain traveled around 200 days out of every year. He had an 11-year old daughter whom he adored and was thinking of quitting his show over. I have no doubt he was exhausted. His friend, Anderson Cooper, said in the retrospective that CNN played on a loop for a few days after his death said that travelling for this kind of work is a grind, and Bourdain had been doing this for over a decade straight. It started with the Travel Channel, but then CNN took the reins and probably drove him like a jockey trying to push his thoroughbred to the finish line. How much did network execs push him to keep going? How long was his contract? His ratings were good, better than the rest of the company’s.
Does this look good to you?In May, 2018 the ratings for Bourdain were great.
Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown (Season 11) averaged 1.070 million total viewers and 461k among adults 25-54 across the four Sunday premiere episodes this season (4/29-5/20/18). The program ranks #1 in its time period in the key demo and easily outperformed Fox and MSNBC by triple digits among 25-54 (+117%; 213k and +184%; 162k respectively). The show ranks #1 in 25-54 and 18-34 in cable news within its time period across every episode season-to-date. So far in 2018, CNN’s Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown is ranking #2 among food and travel non-fiction series in All of Cable, attracting a larger, more affluent, educated, and diverse 25-54 audience to its premieres than similar series on Food Network and Travel Channel.
I think it can be said that he might have been holding up a part of the network. How much pressure was he under to keep performing? Keep traveling? Keep doing more?
On the weekends now, it is at night a lot of Bourdain on CNN. As much as they can push and it sickens me. They still need their pound of flesh. I can only take little bits of it before I have to switch because Land Rover has to “honor” Anthony Bourdain for his life and his work. Right.
The latest statistics on suicide are maddening, but to me they are not surprising. Since 1999, there has been a 30 percent increase in suicide in this country. Think about that year, 1999. I don’t think these numbers are just happenstance. That year, the internet was flourishing. Wall Street was producing big bang numbers. The economy was hot and productivity was outstanding. Cash was coming down like manna from heaven.
It was also the time where (at least in my profession), 70-80 hour work weeks were not uncommon. This was the year of the Y2K bug fix. That mistake created by a bunch of very cheap CEOs who just couldn’t pay for those extra 2 kilobytes to have a full year in their data. Not megabytes. Kilobytes. It was one big grind.
In network news, the O.J. trial was resolved just 4 years prior, with CNN breaking all of the rules and making tons of money from it. Reality TV was in its infancy. Back then, it was thought to be a fad. Now, it’s how we run this country, with the Tweeter-In-Chief making us hang on his every word through his cell phone.
Now, there is even more pressure to produce and more competition from unlikely sources. In my industry, there is global competition from places like India, the Philippines and Costa Rica. These people know what they are doing, and they are cheaper. In network news, (and even local news) the need to out-scoop everyone and outdo the other networks for the latest tidbit from the White House is now resembling “Lord of the Flies”, each news outlet fighting to see who gets their chance at the conch shell. I would bet that Mr. Bourdain saw all of this too acutely, and I would bet it sickened him. There are times when my business sickens me. I shudder to think what people in network news are thinking.
I don’t know why Mr. Bourdain ended his life. As I stated at the beginning, I am angry ABOUT Anthony Bourdain, not AT him. CNN had a special tonight called “Finding Hope: Battling America’s Suicide Crisis”. I couldn’t watch it. That is what I am angry about. People are wrenching garments asking, “What were the warning signs?” and making some cash while doing it. No one is looking at the real root causes.
The warning signs are everywhere. People are working harder for their pay and getting less and less relief every year. Our CEO in the White House is one of those people who demand more and more, but won’t pay you what you need in order to survive. How many stories have we heard about Donald Trump not paying people and seeing those people lose their livelihoods? We have become fearful for our livelihoods because we don’t know if one of those CEOs is going to pull the plug on your job when times get bad, and they always get bad. These same CEOs are now rising prices on their products even with the tax cut bonanza they collected early this year. They pressuring their charges to produce more faster. It’s a wonder the rate isn’t higher.
Anthony was alone in France and no one was checking on him. You can’t expect his friend, a renowned chef, to be his counselor. I believe everyone knew of the pressure, but were afraid that they would rock the boat. They couldn’t let this commodity stop. It was all just too good. No one else was producing like him and that’s all that mattered. He probably felt that there was no way out.
The CEOs of these companies need to be taken into account. In their pursuit of greed, we are seeing some casualties.
One of them could have been me. I was a lucky one.