Guys in Kilts is a travel present that will take the Tucci model and doubles down. You don’t require to have seen Outlander, Starz’s fantastical time-touring Scottish romance, to take pleasure in the appeal of two of its actors, Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish. Certainly, Heughan’s pulchritude is so putting that the strangers he encounters for the duration of the series—from bagpipers to an auld grizzled fishing-boat captain—regularly appear dumbstruck. The principle of Adult men in Kilts is uncomplicated: Visualize The Trip, the Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon comedic travelogue franchise, but with no the acerbic repartee. Instead, Heughan and McTavish, both of those Scottish, drive a camper van by pieces of their native nation and peaceably banter, in a sequence that radiates both of those bonhomie and admirer services.
As soon as, Gentlemen in Kilts might have felt like a straightforward spin-off, the standard things of cross-marketing collection. (Norman Reedus, who stars in AMC’s The Walking Lifeless, has a bike-themed vacation display, also on AMC, that effuses worn leather and performative masculinity.) Now it resonates at a different frequency. As Heughan and McTavish traverse Scotland in their airtight van, what’s most mesmerizing is how number of individuals they come across. Drone footage captures mile just after mile of billowing surroundings, with an unthinkable abundance of stone ruins and purple-heather hills woven into the backdrop. The two actors bicycle, fish, dig for peat, and rappel 99 percent of the time, they’re outside. It is the perfect put up-pandemic Television set travelogue.
To me, Men in Kilts has a visceral enchantment that is distinct from its hosts, as delightfully squabbly and geared up with double entendres as they are. It offers, really just, an escape from other individuals, devoid of an escape from companionship. McTavish and Heughan enable cook langoustines and lobster on a makeshift hearth they skinny-dip in the frigid Atlantic Ocean, with not a solitary bystander. Even when they check out a distillery around Loch Laphroaig, the windows are conspicuously constantly open, to ventilate the malt with the great sea air. They golfing. They throw hammers. They do all this when, like Tucci, bringing their most effective sartorial game, dressed in waxed jackets and cashmere turtlenecks and light tweed. Viewing the present, soon after a calendar year in a New York Metropolis apartment, I experienced a profound longing for the house and sky and air in just about each scene—for landscapes that sign the stamina of humanity but are comfortingly devoid of humans.
The pleasure of looking at Adult males in Kilts, and the marginally a lot more weighted escapism of Seeking for Italy, built me think about what vacation will appear like immediately after the pandemic, and how the yearning to steep on your own in a distinctive locale can endure the speedy foreseeable future of experience masks and isolation. To be optimistic is to assume that all the things could fairly shortly return to “normal,” entire with the capacity to group into a gelateria or be a part of a teeming throng of human bodies getting selfies by the Fontana di Trevi without wincing. But will the impulse to tick locations off predictable bucket lists be traded for a additional intentional type of exploration, and connection?