Bronson’s joyously strange show
ACTION Bronson began a recent episode of The Untitled Action Bronson Show in the barber chair. In the corner of the studio, cobblers were building shoes. The comedian DeRay Davis arrived with some Chicago-style pizza that failed to impress. “Eh, it’s all right,” Bronson said with a shrug. Then, a yoga session began, and after a couple of minutes, he lit a blunt.
At some point, Davis wondered whether the show had come to an end. “I don’t even know,” Bronson replied. “Is it over, the show?”
This merry chaos is the engine and the thrill of The Untitled Action Bronson Show, which airs four nights a week on Viceland, following the rowdy and whipsmart current events series Desus & Mero. It is a joyously disorienting pleasure, bringing high production values to public access chaos.
Untitled is not quite a talk show, not quite a cooking show, not quite a variety show. Some days, it isn’t much of a show at all. But even at its most awkward, it demands active viewing; apart from its half-hour length, there are few guideposts to rely on from episode to episode. Relax, and you’ll miss something.
Action Bronson – who was born Ariyan Arslani and goes by Bronson for short – is Mr Rogers in an XXXL Carhartt T-shirt and Adidas shower slides, blunt dangling from his lips. He is affable, except when he’s sour. He loves to tell male guests they look handsome. He grips a wineglass delicately, by the stem. He takes calls from his girlfriend. The cameras film everything, including the other cameras – there are no correct shots, and thereby no incorrect shots.
Every episode features one or more culinary guests, each of whom works on a dish, sometimes with Bronson’s help, sometimes despite his indifference. Celebrities stop in to cook, too, or sometimes they just eat, like when Bronson prepared steak (donated by Peter Luger) for a former Mr Olympia, Ronnie Coleman.
The corner table rotates between groups of crafters – candle makers, butter churners, origami specialists and so on. There are musical guests (an Albanian orchestra, a theremin player, a SoundCloud rapper) and dancers ( Japanese folk, hula, tap) and curios (a knife thrower, an ice sculptor).
If this sounds like a lot, it is. As television, it is vexing and entrancing, soothingly unstable.
In the middle of all this, Bronson – a cook turned rapper turned food celebrity – is charming and sturdy, immune to the winds. That is, when he is in the middle; sometimes he opts out, taking long breaks outside, or in the bathroom. Everyone – guests, camera operators, producers – seems to be in a perpetual quest to capture his attention. The only moments he displays frustration are when a staffer tries to impose the faintest amount of structure on him.
Bronson’s square-off with the onetime daytime talk stalwart Sally Jesse Raphael, on the show’s second episode, was breathtaking. She was brusque and awkward, refusing the food and wine offered to her and relentlessly prodding her host, “How the heck do you have sex with this beard?” Bronson treated her like a difficult family member, gamely smothering her with love until she relented, somewhat.
The show hasn’t quite matched the weirdness of its first week, when guests had no idea what was happening or how to adjust on the fly. That’s meant that on some recent episodes, the responsibility for eccentricity falls primarily on Bronson, who rises to the occasion with a cascade of non sequiturs: “That vegetable is a fractal vegetable. I’ve seen that vegetable on a DMT trip”; “I was literally thinking about the Care Bears”; “You ever drink Paul Masson? It’ll make you spit in your best friend’s face.”
Insomuch as this is a food show, you don’t really learn how to cook. Mostly you learn how to eat. And how to view the world through a wider, more generous lens. Bronson gives as much airtime and affection to blue-collar chefs and restaurant owners from the boroughs outside Manhattan as he does to the Michelin-starred.
In part, this is likely attributable to Bronson’s upbringing in Queens, the most richly layered and diverse borough. (He was born to an American Jewish mother and an Albanian Muslim father.)
Just as everyone is welcome at the table, this show makes room for everyone in the room to experience whatever else is on offer. Debi Mazar took a hit from Bronson’s blunt, as did her husband, who then sat and played drums with his hands while his wife danced. On other episodes, chefs jumped in the double Dutch line, a wine expert broke a slab of wood with her hand, a guy there to show off his bidet shoved his mouth full of crab. Here, everyone is welcome, and no one is in charge. Just as everyone is welcome at the table, this show makes room for everyone in the room to experience whatever else is on offer.