After the chef, writer and TV host Anthony Bourdain died in 2018, a number of watch publications noted that he was a low-key watch collector who favored well-worn Rolexes and the occasional Patek Philippe. One article even speculated that Mr. Bourdain would relate to the sudden fascination with his timepieces.
“He’d understand that these objects make the world a smaller place and connect people in much the same fashion that sharing a fantastic meal does,” Cole Pennington wrote on the watch site Hodinkee in 2019, when Mr. Bourdain’s collection went up for auction. “They get us talking. Watches, like food, have the ability to transcend borders and politics.”
Perhaps it should be no surprise then that Mr. Bourdain’s kind of globe-trotting cultural documentary has inspired a watch-world equivalent in “Man of the Hour,” an eight-episode series featuring some of the most influential names in the world of watchmaking.
The show premiered on the Discovery Channel this month in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. It is scheduled to debut Nov. 22 in the Middle East and on Jan. 9 on Discovery Plus in the United States.
Hosted by Wei Koh, the founder of Revolution Media, a global watch-media company with headquarters in Singapore, the show devotes each hourlong episode to a different man or team of creators: François-Paul Journe; Karl-Friedrich Scheufele of Chopard; Denis Flageollet of De Bethune; Alex and Andrew Rosenfield and Kari Voutilainen of Urban Jürgensen; Rexhep Rexhepi; Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey of Greubel Forsey; Jean Arnault, Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini of La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton; and Maximilian Büsser of MB&F.
“I was a huge Anthony Bourdain fan,” Mr. Koh, who also is an executive producer of the series, said during a recent video interview from his home in Singapore as his longhair miniature dachshunds, Bandit and Bambi, nestled on his lap. “For a while, I was like, ‘I wish there was a TV show on the watch industry that told stories the same way, unveiling the human dimension.’”
Watches, Unscripted
Even as he daydreamed about a watch lifestyle series, Mr. Koh said he did not imagine himself as host. He did, however, realize that interest in watches had exploded during the pandemic and the time was ripe for a show that revealed more intimate portraits of some of the industry’s popular personalities.
“Everyone wants to learn the story about how Picasso became Picasso,” he said. “Or how Miles Davis dropped out of Juilliard and started hanging out with Bird. Everyone wants to know those seminal stories of how people become great artists.”
Mr. Koh cited a scene from Episode 6 on Mr. Greubel, a reclusive watchmaker known for his rarefied horological creations, as an example of a story that a wider audience would appreciate: “He’s like the J.D. Salinger of watchmaking in that no one has really seen him in public in over a quarter-century.”
When Mr. Koh couldn’t confirm Mr. Greubel’s participation in the show, he met in Geneva with Michel Nydegger, the chief executive of Greubel Forsey (and Mr. Greubel’s stepson). From there, the men rode their motorcycles to the Vue des Alpes, a high pass in the Jura Mountains. “We decided to embark on this kind of ‘Easy Rider’-ish motorcycle road trip on old bikes and try to find Robert,” Mr. Koh said.
Of course he brought the film team along. “We were working on the idea that when the student is ready, the master will appear,” Mr. Koh said. “But I had no idea if we were ever going to see him. So we’re brainstorming: ‘How are we going to make this work in case we don’t?’
“And then on top of the Alps, I hear this Harley-Davidson, and he rolls up in tennis shorts, a leather jacket, riding his Harley Springer with his wife, Michel’s mom, on the back.
“Then we go to his farm and you realize his whole passion in life is raising animals. He’s raising peacocks. The only time he talks about his watchmaking is while he’s making a fondue. There’s a really interesting analogy with the way he’s making the fondue because he’s doing it incredibly slowly. They say it throughout the episode: ‘Greubel Forsey doesn’t really make money.’ You can’t make money with 130 watchmakers making 200 watches a year. But they want to be a repository for these skills that will get lost otherwise.”
Each of the episodes was directed in a slightly different style, with subtle homages to various films that have inspired Mr. Koh, a cinephile who worked in Hollywood as an assistant to the director Kathryn Bigelow in the late 1990s.
The episode featuring Mr. Journe, for example, is “a little bit of a tribute to Francis Ford Coppola,” Mr. Koh said. (The director even makes a cameo appearance.)
Host With the Most
Mr. Koh created the series with Karen Seah, the owner and chief executive of Refinery Media in Singapore, who became the showrunner and an executive producer. The two, already longtime acquaintances, ran into each other in September 2023 at the Formula 1 race in Singapore.
Ms. Seah had seen Mr. Koh’s watch videos on Instagram and YouTube during the pandemic, and had been struck by how different they were from the usual dry, technical fare.
“I wondered why watch content online felt so serious,” Ms. Seah said on a video call in October from her home in Singapore. “I thought to myself, ‘Actually, he’s quite natural at hosting.’ And he doesn’t look like your regular Asian watch nerd. He’s got all these tattoos. He wears his Hawaiian shirts and very loud jewelry.
“At F1, I said to him, ‘What do you think about doing a watch series together?’”
Filming began in early June, and spanned four weeks across three continents, with stops in Singapore, Los Angeles, Paris and Geneva.
The eight brands featured in Season 1 (Season 2, scheduled to start filming next year, is to focus on major brands) are connected by their importance to the independent watchmaking scene — even Mr. Arnault of Louis Vuitton, whom Mr. Koh described as “his generation’s greatest champion for independent watchmaking” thanks to his revival of the Daniel Roth and Gerald Genta brands and his creation of the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives.
Beyond that, Mr. Koh considers each of the men to be a friend. “It dawned on me that the conversations were never going to be watchable or appealing if you didn’t feel like these two people liked each other,” he said. “My role is to provide a framework and then just listen. I also wanted to dispel myths about certain individuals.”
Specifically, he referred to Mr. Journe, the focus of Episode 1. “Everyone has this perception of him being this very intimidating, charismatic but very tough genius,” Mr. Koh said. “Actually, he’s one of the nicest guys in the world. The question then became, ‘How do I reveal that in the show?’ So I invited his 20 best friends, unbeknownst to him, to a surprise party for him and just talk about their friendship and love for him.” Let’s just say the plan went a little awry, with a client complaining to Mr. Journe that the boutique was closed (for the party) — and Mr. Journe becoming angry because no one would tell him why.
But to William Rohr, founder of the independent brand Massena LAB and best known in the watch world by his pseudonym, William Massena, Mr. Koh’s good-humored, self-deprecating style was the episode’s real takeaway.
“Wei has a way of sharing his love for watches,” Mr. Massena, who is featured as a talking head in the series, said in a phone interview in October from New York. “He’s enthusiastic, knowledgeable and knows how to capture the audience.”
Artists United
Mr. Koh, who was born and raised in New York to Singaporean parents, drew on his high school French to converse with Mr. Journe and some of the other watchmakers featured in the series (English subtitles are used throughout).
“A third of the show is me just fighting my way through conversations,” Mr. Koh said. “I was trying to look my best, so I didn’t drink for a month before the show. After the first day of speaking French, I’m like, ‘I need a beer.’ It was tiring, but important for those guys to feel comfortable.”
Mr. Koh stretched himself in other ways, too. “There’s a scene where I have to box with Rexhep — he’s actually a really good boxer,” he said. “I have to survive three rounds to be considered for an allocation.”
In a follow-up email, Mr. Koh wrote: “I think he took pity on me and from what I understand, I am now on the list for an RRCCII,” referring to Mr. Rexhepi’s Chronomètre Contemporain II model.
The descriptions underscore the inherently masculine tone of the series — as if the title weren’t plain enough.
“We struggled about the inclusion of women in the title ‘Man of the Hour,’” Ms. Seah said. “Obviously, it’s a play on words. But we were careful to ensure that we did include women, and in later seasons, there will be more women involved.”
After all, the series reflects the industry it celebrates — male-dominated, to be sure, but also home to perfectionists whose love for the art and craft of watchmaking outweighs their desire to make a fast buck. This, Mr. Koh said, comes through in the final episode, featuring Mr. Büsser of MB&F.
“The recurring message from Max is that this work is excruciatingly difficult,” Mr. Koh said. “Now it’s very fashionable and people are making money, but no one gets involved in this with a financial objective in mind. You get into this because there’s something you want to express.
“They put every ounce of their soul into what they create,” he added. “Somehow, they’re trying to wring greater beauty or greater accuracy from a mechanical system that has no rationale for existence. If that’s not art, I don’t know what is.”
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