• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, September 10, 2018

Opinions will inevitably vary on this subject, as opinions do on any subject, but for some (if not for many), CNN's insistence on continuing to air its Anthony Bourdain show “Parts Unknown” following his death by suicide last June feels inappropriate.

Last week, CNN began promoting the upcoming final season of “Parts Unknown,” set to get underway on Sunday, September 23.

On Thursday, the cable channel made an official announcement: The final season of “Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown” will consist of seven episodes that will be assembled from footage and some narration that producers were able to obtain before Bourdain made the decision to end his life in a hotel-inn in France on June 8.

CNN's press release said filming for the 12th (and now final) season of “Parts Unknown” was “in progress” when Bourdain killed himself.

As a result, CNN had enough material to produce five “location-based” shows (the ones in which Bourdain was seen visiting locales abroad and sampling the food).

Bourdain provided narration for only one of these five shows, however -- a visit to Kenya -- before his untimely death.

Narration for the other location-based shows will now have to be provided by someone else. Those shows will have Bourdain visiting Spain, Indonesia, West Texas and Manhattan's Lower East Side.

The two other shows rounding out this seven-episode season will be styled as tributes to Bourdain and the people who worked with him to produce this CNN series.

Special No. 1 “explores how Anthony Bourdain's unique perspective and voice altered the world of food, travel and culture and in the process reinvented how audiences watched television and engaged intimately and actively with the world around them,” CNN said.

Special No. 2 focuses on “Bourdain's relationship with his crew, the team that traveled with him and slogged through the trenches,” CNN said. “In this episode, the people who made ‘Parts Unknown’ select moments from their episodes and pull back the curtain to talk about collaboration, creative freedom, moments when Bourdain had their back or called them out [and] the times when he was caught off guard or forgot the cameras were even there.”

Fans of Bourdain who were very vocal in their mourning of his passing on social media last spring might certainly welcome these last glimpses of the globetrotting chef at work and in his element.

Speaking for myself, however, I belong in the group of people (assuming there are others who feel the same way) who have found it uncomfortable and unsettling to come across episodes of “Parts Unknown” on CNN this summer.

The shows, of course, feature Bourdain when he was very much alive. Seeing him so often, and so soon after his death, was often jarring and needless to say, sad.

Each time I saw him, I asked myself the same questions: (1) Why did he do it? And (2) in re-airing so many of his old shows, was CNN exploiting his death, even a little bit?

And now that CNN intends to air seven new episodes -- the majority of which had to be completed from available parts (and perhaps new parts) after Bourdain's death made him unavailable to complete them -- another question arises: What would Bourdain have wanted?

It is a sensitive subject. And given the mystery that still surrounds Bourdain's decision to commit suicide, the question cannot really be answered reliably.

However, it is not unreasonable to wonder if Bourdain's suicide represented a decision on his part to not continue with the show. For all anyone knows, Bourdain might not have approved of shows assembled from material that was only partially completed.

But that is obviously conjecture. The people in the best position to understand Bourdain (other than his own family and close personal friends) are the people at CNN and the production company, Zero Point Zero Production (which produced “Parts Unknown”), who worked closely with him on the show.

Maybe they have a much better handle on whether Bourdain would have wanted this “final” season to be assembled at all.

The sad fact is that he is not around to ask. And the reasons why he took his own life are still a mystery.