Eugene Levy is the star of "The Reluctant Traveler" (Apple TV+, beginning Friday), a sweet stunt travel show that mixes touristic interest with incidental comedy and late-life personal growth. I imagine this all began with some producer's notion that it would be amusing to have the guy who ran the down-market Rosebud Motel in "Schitt's Creek" host a show about remarkable, better-than-first-class luxury hotels around the world. But, reportedly, the series as it emerged was shaped by Levy's genuine disinclination toward adventure and new experiences — his comfort zone is seemingly the size of a walk-in closet — and the series finds things for him to do he would ordinarily avoid.
The show combines travel-series tropes with prearranged scenarios in which Levy is dropped into challenging situations — which, for the most part, after some hemming and hawing, he submits to, whether it's walking across a suspension bridge (he fears heights) or eating sushi (he never has) in a Tokyo "art" restaurant, or simply heading out into an unfamiliar city.
A fit 75 at the time of filming (though he will point out more than once that he's "old"), Levy finds himself driving a dog sled, piloting a sailboat, riding a horse, planting a coffee tree, screwing a hole in the ice to fish, feeding reindeer or sheep. ("The sheep ran as soon as they saw me. Did they see a movie they didn't particularly care for?") In a different sort of challenge, he's sent for a session of "forest therapy" — he's never had or wanted any sort of therapy, preferring to keep the private private — where, advised to reveal something he has never told a soul, he confesses to the Costa Rican rainforest that he once lost $800 in a poker game.
