NEW YORK • There are celebrities with TV travel shows who just can’t wait to show you where they came from or push the limits of their bodies or go out of their way to locate a perfect recipe. Then there’s Eugene Levy.

The “Schitt’s Creek” star admits he’s not really a fan of the cold or the heat. He doesn’t really like eating strange things and, well, insects freak him out. He’d rather stay home, to be honest.

“Not only do I not love traveling, I’ve got a very low sense of curiosity,” he says during an interview. “I do not have an adventurous spirit. And I’m actually thinking, well, aren’t those things you need to host a travel show?”

Not necessarily, and so welcome, to Apple TV+’s “The Reluctant Traveler With Eugene Levy,” the unlikely wedding of a droll and cautious host with some of the most beautiful places on Earth.

During the eight-episode series, Levy swims in a frozen lake in Finland, walks around slot canyons in Utah and explores a rainforest in Costa Rica.

He also visits Italy, Japan, the Maldives, Portugal and South Africa, even going on safari and enjoying a gin and tonic as he does.

The more uncomfortable he seems, the funnier the show becomes. “I’m the more Great Indoors type of guy,” he jokes to his guide in a forest in Costa Rica brimming with thousands of species of animals, what he calls “all those tiny threats to life.” While ice fishing in Finland, he notes drily: “Hearty and resilient are two words that have never been used to describe me.”

“I’m hoping this appeals to seasoned travelers that might watch this and chuckle,” he says later in the interview. “But also to people who, like me, don’t travel extensively, are not fond of traveling, don’t have that sense of adventure, so to speak — that they will see me as a kindred spirit.”

“The Reluctant Traveler” was initially a show pitched as a way to feature hotels with remarkable views that morphed into one which really shines when Levy leaves them to go into the culture he’s visiting and is changed.

In Utah, he stays in an elegant property overlooking the Colorado Plateau where rooms go for more than $3,000 a night but finds a real sense of spirituality visiting his Navajo guide’s modest homestead.

“The memorable thing for me, by and large, are the people that I’m running into,” Levy says. “I’m hoping that this is one of those shows with a nice kind of different personality.”

In Finland, Levy rides a snowmobile, goes ice fishing and ice swimming, eats reindeer and attempts husky sledding — “How do you say slow down in dog?” he asks — and ice swimming. He finds Finns deserve their reputation as some of the happiest people on Earth.

“I’ve never met people that were any happier and don’t know whether being big vodka drinkers has anything to do with it,” he jokes.

Actor Eugene Levy, center, in a scene from his new travel series “The Reluctant Traveler,” premiering Friday.

Apple TV+ via the associated press