The Reluctant Traveller
★★★

No one does awkward better than Eugene Levy. Whether it’s the father with the gift for oversharing on matters sexual in the American Pie films, a stoner folk singer in Christopher Guest’s mockumentary A Mighty Wind, or the big-fish out of water Johnny Rose in Schitt’s Creek, Levy’s characters always look just a little (or a lot) ill at ease with whichever world they find themselves in.

And if The Reluctant Traveller is to be believed, the same is true of Levy himself.

The world is a book, he intones in the opening credit sequence, and if a person hasn’t travelled they’ve only read one page of it. “Well, I’ve gotta say,” he adds. “I’ve read a few pages, and I’m not crazy about the book.”

It’s a decent set-up – a guy who’d rather stay home gets dropped into exotic spots, and is forced to have experiences he’d prefer to avoid – and Levy’s caterpillar eyebrows, Corbusier glasses and deadpan expression are the perfect travel accessories. But it doesn’t take too long for the ruse to slip.

Try as he might to maintain the curmudgeonly facade, Levy is soon having fun. In Finnish Lapland, he eschews an icy morning dip but after a few vodkas he’s readily cajoled into a swim (albeit inside a hermetically sealed neoprene suit-cum-garbage bag) … and, loving it. In Costa Rica he’s pushing through his terror of insects, snakes and erupting volcanoes to go for a night-time jungle walk, and battling his fear of heights to tiptoe across a rickety suspension bridge.

By the third episode, he’s not even pretending to hate it any more. “I’m actually very excited about seeing Venice,” he says.

It’s not the travelling itself that Levy claims to object to; after all, it kind of goes with the territory of being a film and TV actor. It’s more the business of leaving his hotel room. “Exploring is something I rarely do when I’m travelling,” he claims, before setting off to explore (damn those TV producers).