FX shoots 'Tony' in Bourdain’s old haunts

A new FX series called “Tony” was shot in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where writers Todd Bartels and Lou Howe traced the early life of Anthony Bourdain to craft the show.

The two spent years researching Bourdain’s formative years in the late 1970s, when he worked as a dishwasher and line cook at his family’s failing seafood restaurant, then wandered Provincetown’s bars and beaches as a drifting 17-year-old. Bartels and Howe drove the coast in Bourdain’s footsteps, drank in the same dive bars he frequented, and interviewed locals who remembered him. Those visits became the DNA of the six-episode limited series, which premiered this week.

The show’s producers chose Provincetown for its unchanged waterfront and narrow streets, letting them recreate 1978 almost frame-for-frame. Scenes were shot inside The Crown & Anchor, a gay bar Bourdain listed as one of his teenage haunts, and outside the former Lobster Pot restaurant where he worked. “We wanted to feel the salt air and the neon light that he carried with him,” Bartels said. The series leans on Bourdain’s own writing, splicing in passages from his 2001 book Kitchen Confidential and his 1999 New Yorker essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” Critics note the show captures Bourdain’s voice before he became a global TV star, when he was just “Tony” to friends—lost, smart, and searching.

FX has already renewed “Tony” for a second season, focusing on Bourdain’s early days in New York City. The gamble is whether the show can feel as raw and honest as Bourdain’s own work without leaning on his later fame. If it succeeds, it could become a template for adapting writers’ early years into drama. If it stumbles, it risks feeling like a tourist postcard of a life already well documented. Either way, Provincetown’s bars and back alleys get a second shot at shaping Bourdain’s story—this time on screen.