Stanley Tucci’s next trip to Italy will face a slight delay.
CNN will bump the debuts of a handful of looming original documentary projects due to its ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The second season of “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” will premiere on CNN later in the spring, as will the new series “Nomad with Carlton McCoy.” Meanwhile, the WarnerMedia network will push back the debut of “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” to Sunday March 13 at 9 p.m., a week later than its previously scheduled March 6 launch.
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The network has built a new business out of documentaries and docuseries, but it must balance those projects with the demands of the news cycle.
During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, CNN found itself delaying a new season of W. Kamau Bell’s “United Shades of America” at least twice. And the network pushed back the debut of media journalist Bill Carter’s “The Story of Late Night” for months, realizing that a documentary about American humor might not find as receptive an audience during such a difficult global moment.
“News will trump a series, especially big news,” Amy Entelis, CNN’s executive vice president for talent and content development, told Variety in July of 2020. “We know how to be flexible. We know how to move things around. We just need to be sure our audiences know how to find it when it comes back.”
“Nomad” follows sommelier McCoy as he examines music, food, fashion and culture. “Roadrunner” examines Bourdain’s life, using thousands of hours of the celebrity chef and explorer’s archives, letters and photos as well as more than 30 original interviews with people close to him.
Tucci’s series in particular has been a recent favorite at CNN, garnering two Primetime Emmy nominations for its first cycle. The show is seen by some as the natural heir to Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown,” a CNN series that has proven quite popular. Bourdain died as the result of a suicide while filming the series in France in 2018.
But “Searching for Italy” has faced its own delays. Its original bunch of episodes were filmed in pre-pandemic 2019 and then in 2020, but did not debut on CNN until February 14, 2021.
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