You should know right now, if you didn’t know already, that what drives the team behind PARTS UNKNOWN is not to do what we did last week or last month — or ever. We are delighted when our viewers like an episode and even more delighted when they love one. But we are compelled, just the same, to avoid repeating what we’ve done before. If we fail — we want to fail outrageously, foolishly, gloriously — giving it everything we’ve got in the cause of making something new and strange and hopefully, awesome. Our latest Rome episode is perhaps, the most ambitious example of that compulsion.

My long time team have for years discussed the possibility of shooting an episode entirely in wide screen, letterbox anamorphic format — like so many of the movies we admire. And for this episode, we finally got our way. This was necessarily a mammoth undertaking. Networks don’t like it — as it makes distribution to countries where they might still have square TV sets difficult. To do it right requires additional equipment, lighting, expense — and, in this case, the addition of a sizable Italian film crew. Working within the Italian filmmaking system presents….challenges of its own. The kinds of images we anticipated capturing required music adequate to the scale and subject. Which meant we needed an actual score — in this case, a beautiful collection of related pieces on a theme by our long time music director Michael Ruffino. And I was adamant about acquiring rights to an existing piece of music — the song “Spiral Waltz” from the wonderful 60’s sci-fi satire, “The 10th Victim”.