How Bourdain Inspired Netflix's New Science and Travel Show
Host Latif Nasser on his favorite filming locations and why we need more than Attenborough-narrated nature shows.
Why does observing veery birds in Delaware help us predict hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico? What can a sample of water from the Thames tell us about how Londoners like to party? How do the remains of a fossilized 8,000-year-old catfish in the middle of the Sahara Desert in Chad feed the Amazon?
For journalist Latif Nasser, these aren't rhetorical questions. As the face of the Netflix science docuseries Connected, Nasser—of WNYC's Radiolab and the podcast The Other Latif—hopscotches across continents with a fluidity we can only dream about now. In the process, he uncovers amazing scientific research in the unlikeliest of locations, on subjects ranging from surveillance to poop to clouds. But for all of that science, Nasser also shares plenty about the destinations he visits, making it just as much a science show as a travel show.
"The rest of the world is an incredible place, which you would be lucky to see and hang out in and learn from," Los Angeles–based Nasser says. "If nothing else, I hope that's a thing this show can do—show that there's amazing science happening everywhere, and that's the only way we're going to solve these problems."
How did Connected come about?
I was doing my regular job as a radio producer when I got this email from Zero Point Zero Production [the company behind Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown]. So much of the DNA of this show is in homage to kind of a Bourdain-y model. Before Bourdain, so much food television was a person in the kitchen, and Bourdain basically blew that up. We wanted to do the same for a hosted science show—a show that's not just in a lab. Let's look at scientists doing cool things in different corners of the world, where they're actually doing them, as opposed to doing little rinky-dink experiments in a studio.
Ultimately, the genesis of Connected was: If we go out to what feels like the middle of nowhere to explore these science stories, the fun is trying to leapfrog your way back. How does this affect the person on the couch? How does this scientific discovery being made on the other side of the world have a palpable impact on this person's daily life?
It's not a conventional travel show, but you traveled a lot. What did you discover about the world?
You'd go to a park in Delaware, behind all the trees, or to the middle of the Sahara, or the middle of the rainforest in the Amazon, or underneath the London sewers—and it just felt like everywhere you look and everywhere you wouldn't have thought to look, there are scientists sitting there, minding their own business, trying to answer these big, beautiful questions. If I went off of a road in any direction, I was sure I was going to find some scientist working on some random thing that would totally blow my mind. It's empowering and inspiring to see all these people in the last places you'd expect.
It seems unfathomable to even attempt a show like this right now. What were the logistics like?
At first we thought it'd be super efficient: we'd do all the Western European locations, then all the African locations. Then we realized, this scientist isn't available on that day, this bird happens to be in the forest at this time, we gotta go now. We had three director-producer teams flying all over the world, and I was going in between, jumping from place to place, doing red-eyes every other night to totally random locations.
It was the most disorienting thing. I felt like Jason Bourne. One time I woke up and was like, 'What is that ungodly noise?' I was sleeping in the middle of the Amazon, and there were some kind of primates. It was crazy the noise they were making in the middle of the night.
Nasser studies the sky with Tapio Schneider, a senior research scientist at NASA, in Los Angeles
What was your favorite location?
The highlight was the Sahara—it was just magnificent. That episode was the story of dust, and dust from the Sahara fertilizing the Amazon. But really it became this story of life and death. In Chad, we drove out for so long into the middle of nowhere, and there was just a watering hole—it was literally just water in a hole, and the only other thing around there were three palm trees. Then there were birds, a bunch of birds. And I'm like, 'Where do you get your sustenance from? How do you survive off of three trees and a water hole in the middle of nowhere?'
You summed up the show on Twitter recently by saying it's "it's basically if Bill Nye and Anthony Bourdain had an awkward Muslim baby," which is something we've definitely never seen before.
The first brown person I remember seeing on TV or in movies was—do you remember Short Circuit 2? I was like, 'Oh, cool, it's an Indian scientist.' But it was a white guy in brownface! It wasn't even a brown guy! Representation matters—as much as we all love the Attenboroughs, that's not the only way it has to be. I've never seen that role in that voice before, that kind of enthusiasm, and that kind of approach. Hopefully I'm bringing something fresh to the table. And maybe not, maybe I'm doing just the exact same thing they're doing, and that's totally fine, too. Maybe at least to some people it feels a little different.
Connected feels super timely at this moment, as we're all facing the impact of the world's connectedness.
When I pitched this show, it felt like this very cool, surprising thing, like a thesis you would actually have to prove: Oh, hey, we're all connected in subtle ways. When COVID-19 happened, I was like, no one is going to watch this show, it's the most obvious thing, we all now know this in a painful and actually quite scary way. And yet on hearing the response, to me the takeaway is about how we're connected, but not in the deadly, scary ways—in the profound, beautiful, surprising, poetic ways. Just these subtle things that are always going on, that maybe are hopeful, encouraging, or at least somehow remind people that we are all in this together. Even when we think we're disconnected, we're actually all connected.
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