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Anthony Bourdain Is Making A Mini-Series About One Very Unlikely US City

Anthony Bourdain Is Making A Mini-Series About One Very Unlikely US City

Anthony Bourdain never ceases to surprise us. In what is a seemingly unlikely pick for his next venture, the chef/TV host/obsessive traveller is setting his sights on Michigan’s Motor City.

CNN has just announced Bourdain’s new television mini-series, temporarily named Detroit 1963: Once In A Great City, which will focus on the once thriving city of Detroit.

According to Variety, the series “will take viewers back to a time in America when people believed in the power and goodness of big corporations, had high hopes for racial parity, and looked to institutions like unions and the government to solve their problems.”

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Detroit is an interesting example of a city that once relied so heavily on large local corporations to keep the local economy afloat, only to have them decline and the city follow. Detroit used to have a population of 2 million, and now with only 700,000 residents, has been left virtually empty.

Bourdain told Eater that the series is based on the David Maraniss book of the same name.

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Photo: Rick Harris/Flickr CC

Though the move initially surprised us, Conde Nast Traveler pointed out that it’s not the first time Bourdain has expressed interest in the industrial city. In the last episode of season two, he took viewers to one of Detroit’s largest abandoned factories, the Packard Plant, and spoke to the one man who lived there.

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You can watch it below:

He wrote on his Tumblr about this particular episode, expressing his love for Detroit and why the city’s story deserves to be told. He said of the city’s abandoned buildings, “We shot them, illuminated them like monuments, with, I hope, the same respect as the Parthenon, the Coliseum, the remains of a magnificent—if ancient—civilization.”

If his musings on the city are anything to go by, we think he’ll do justice to the city.

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