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CNN had a bonafide non-news original programming hit when Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy debuted in 2021. The series was warm, engaging, and authentic. Plus it was fun to travel vicariously on screen while we were still under lockdown in reality. CNN has been trying to continue the food & travel magic ever since; Eva Longoria has hosted Searching for Mexico and Searching for Spain iterations, and now Tucci’s brother from another movie (Big Night) is stepping up to the burner. We learned about Breaking Bread earlier this year, and now it’s finally airing! The show follows Shalhoub across the globe as he tracks different cultural practices related to one food item: bread. In an interview with CNN, Shalhoub shared his own fond, familial bread-making memories, as well as what scares him about working unscripted:
“It’s the most difficult thing. That was one of the most startling things about it, was that unscripted is just much harder for me personally,” he told CNN in a recent interview. “It just came to me that maybe that’s why I became an actor to begin with, is that people just tell me what to do. Just to say this, stand here, make this face.”
…Shalhoub has wonderful memories connected to bread, which makes him the right man for this particular carb-heavy job.
“When I was a kid, there were these two old aunties that were from out of town, but they would come into town and they would go from one relative’s house to another and they would make this beautiful Syrian bread, this flatbread,” he recalled. “They would take 25, 30 pounds of flour down into the basement where my father had an oven set up down there, and they would have all of this flour and all of this labor flipping the dough by hand with a cigarette in their mouths.”
He took memories like that on his journey discovering fascinating things about each country, their culture and, of course, their bread.
For example, in Brazil, the “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” actor learned that the country was much bigger than he realized, and that along with the Portuguese there is also a sizeable Middle Eastern and Japanese population.
“It’s such a great blend of such a beautiful melting pot,” Shalhoub said. “I was eating things there that I didn’t really know existed.”
And the man who famously starred in one of the most beloved food movies of all time — 1996’s “Big Night” — said the series turned out even better than he expected.
“It kind of surpassed our expectations to be honest. We had a kind of a framework that we wanted to work within, but — and I’m loathe to confess this because I don’t necessarily want the CNN people to know this and now they will — but we just really didn’t know what the show was going to be about,” he said, laughing. “We kind of had to go on faith or on hope that it was going to take on a life of its own and become something that we hadn’t necessarily planned on. And then that’s kind of how it turned out.”
It tickles me that such a well-seasoned actor — Emmy and Tony winning! — seems to be so flummoxed by the prospect of unscripted. Maybe the lack of a traditional script is also what made Tony worried they “didn’t know what the show was going to be about.” But much like the flatbread his aunties used to make from scratch, I think he’s selling himself short. Full disclosure, I haven’t seen the show yet myself, but it’s on the menu for the weekend when I visit my mother where we’ll have carbs a-plenty on hand to aid in our digestion of the content. But come on, it’s Tony Shalhoub! Arguably the one man on the planet who makes that mustache work, even if it was disruptive to the central premise of the show. (And you know I rarely give mustache approval.) And I have seen some clips, so feel confident in saying Tony rises to the occasion.
Breaking Bread airs on CNN on Sundays at 9pm for 42 minutes (without commercials), or until done. Thank you for swallowing my battering of baking puns.