The Haunting Afterlife of Anthony Bourdain

It's been three years since Anthony Bourdain died, by suicide, in June of 2018, and the void he left is still a void. "I wish Anthony Bourdain was here to see this," countless people have tweeted over the past thirty-seven-ish months, on occasions as varied as a New York gubernatorial candidate ordering a cinnamon-raisin bagel, the White House serving a McDonald's banquet, the collapse of the American restaurant industry, and the sputtering attempts to revive the same. Bourdain was a television megastar, a fluid and conversational writer, a social-media gadfly, a pointed cultural commentator, and seemingly everyone's best friend. The singularity of his celebrity and the suddenness of his death have fuelled an uncommonly intense, uncommonly enduring grief--a personal sense of public loss, of a sort usually reserved for popes and Presidents. In 2019, about a year after Bourdain's death, the documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville began talking to people who had been close to Bourdain: his family, his friends, the producers and crew of his television series.