Food, Glorious Food

Cable Capitalizes on America's Favorite Obsession

By Janice Rhoshalle -- Multichannel News, 2/22/2010 8:26:00 AM

Satisfying America’s appetite for food-centric series seems impossible these days. While the expert stand-and-stir cooking shows continue to be a breadand- butter staple, the food genre has blossomed in the past four or five years with character-driven docuseries and entertaining competition shows — and with high definition, the experience is so vivid you can almost taste it.

Perhaps the biggest difference in the cooking show category is that today’s shows aren’t so much about how to cook food as they are about the entertainment value of watching people cook it. “Presentation of food on television is broadly entertaining,” said Frances Berwick, executive vice president of programming and production for Bravo, home to the cooking competition hit Top Chef and franchise spinoffs Top Chef Masters and Just Desserts.

That shift from education to entertainment has driven higher ratings for the category, a change in the audience makeup and has led to more shows on more networks.

“Food is a really rich playground filled with competitive egos and dramatic people and beautiful visuals,” said Bob Tuschman, senior vice president of production and programming for Scripps Networks Interactive-owned Food Network. The 16-year-old Food has seen its ratings among 25-to-54- year-olds grow roughly 54% since 2004 with its primetime gumbo of Iron Chef, The Next Food Network Star and The Best Thing I Ever Ate.

Today’s food-centric TV consumers are vastly different from those who tuned into public-TV stations some 40-plus years ago to watch The French Chef with Julia Child, the subject of last summer’s runaway hit movie, Julie & Julia.

“Viewers of Top Chef typically aren’t people who want to cook themselves, they are just foodies,” said Berwick. “They like food; they like eating in restaurants; they like being wowed by talented chefs and are interested in seeing the process as it happens.”

New cooks have entered the kitchen. Cooking Channel — set to supplant Scripps’ Fine Living Network on May 31 — is looking to wow new-generation food fans by bringing some familiar faces, along with a host of new culinary masters from the U.S. and abroad, to the latest 24-hour food network. It was expected last Friday (Feb. 19) to announce six of the new original shows that will be on its roster at launch.

Some programs will showcase Food Network talent in different ways, Scripps Networks senior vice president of communications Cindy McConkey said. To wit: a new series from Rachael Ray, A Week in a Day, about advance meal planning; barbecue ace Bobby Flay’s new show, Brunch With Bobby; and Emeril’s Fast and Fresh (working title), with chef Emeril Lagasse. Introducing new talent, Toronto chef Chuck Hughes hosts Chuck’s Day Off. Targeting ethnic fare will be Trinidian chef Roger Mooking’s Everyday Exotic. And Laura Calder tackles a popular cuisine genre in French Food at Home.

“The interest in food and cooking has exploded so much that we felt if we didn’t launch a second food channel then somebody else like Discovery [Communications] or one of the other major networks would beat us to it,” said Cooking Channel general manager Michael Smith. “If it were just a superficial genre interest in the way that entertainment genres seem to come and go, we probably would have been more cautious about it. But we see some basic changes in the American lifestyle and culture that make us feel this is a long-term trend.”

Added Smith: “It’s almost like cooking from scratch without a recipe — you throw in some flour and throw in some eggs, then add some sugar and baking soda, and you should get muffins.”

Cooking, which inherits FLN’s nearly 55 million subscribers, expects to announce 14 new (or at least new to the U.S.) programs by launch. The network will have about 60%-70% new original shows, McConkey said, and will feature an eclectic slate of how-to shows, travel, history and documentary series centered on diet and nutrition, as well as ethnic cuisine geared to a more astute palette.

Smith said the Cooking Channel’s target viewer is the “Julie Powell” character from Julie & Julia. “It’s the college student who has cocktail parties in their dorm room, or a young mom who wants to introduce her kids to exotic foods. At all levels, people are just more into wanting to dive deeper into the topic of food.”

Travel Channel has stirred the pot, too, with shows such as Man vs. Food and Food Wars. “It adds to what brings a destination to life in your own home,” said Travel Channel senior vice president of content Michael Klein. “It’s like a great bottle of wine from Argentina, you open it up and suddenly it’s the smell of Argentina, and that to me is why I believe you’re seeing such a surge in this. In tough times, when things are bumpy, it’s a memory of a simpler time, when life was just a little bit better.”

While the economic downturn has prompted some to start rattling the pots and pans at home, only 57% of meals in this country are home-cooked, “and there is some sense that cooking on TV is replacing cooking in our real lives,” says Michael Pollan, journalist and author of Food Rules, a follow-up to his best-seller Th e Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. He serves as special consultant to the awardwinning documentary, Food, Inc., which will air April 21 on PBS.

“One of the things I preach to people is, it’s really important to cook. It’s important to your health, it’s important to the farmers and it’s important to your family life — cooking meals together — and people tell me they don’t have time to cook.”

In a recent article in The New York Times, Pollan cited other causes for this perplexing paradox: more women are now working outside of the home; food companies are persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and technological advances have made it easier to forego preparing meals.

But, said Pollan, “if we would just take some of that time we’re spending watching people cook on TV and just do it, we’d be so much better off .”

Sharing Pollan’s back-to-basics theology, The Fabulous Beekman Boys, premiering June 16 on Planet Green, follows the journey of cosmopolitan couple Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge as would-be farmers in upstate New York producing everything they use, from soap to cheese, the old-fashioned way.

For Planet Green, food programming is about “food sourcing and food politics,” said president and general manager Laura Michalchyshyn. “The food genre is such a challenging one, but it’s such a natural for what we’re doing on Planet Green focusing environmentalism and ecology and passionate people doing forward thinking things.”

Forward thinking is what Ben Roche and Homaro Cantu do in their show Future Food, set for a June debut on Planet Green. The show follows the noted Chicago restaurateurs as they replicate traditional foods like steak, sushi or a root beer float by using organic or vegan sources.

It’s “food science,” Michalchyshyn said, explaining the crux of the show. “This is not The Joy of Cooking — it’s all about creating a new design, a new model for what we will be eating.”

Cable has come a long way from the salad days, where the hottest thing on a then fledgling Food Network was a little show called How to Boil Water and a fresh-faced Louisiana chef named Emeril Lagasse (who’s now a docuseries star on Planet Green).

Currently reaching nearly 100 million homes, Food Network has grown into a lifestyle cottage industry, spawning the wildly successful two-year-old Hearst magazine imprint which regularly features series talent like Paula Deen (Paula’s Home Cooking), Alton Brown (Good Eats), Duff Goldman (Ace of Cakes), Guy Fieri (Diners, Drive-ins and Dives), Giada De Laurentiis (Giada at Home) and husband-and-wife team Pat and Gina Neely (Down Home With the Neelys), who have become some of the most recognizable names in television.

“We’re always looking for very memorable, relatable funny, inspirational and outsized personalities, people who can really bring the world to life,” said Tuschman. “You have to have huge personalities that people will want to invite back and spend time with night after night.”

Personalities draw audiences to BBC America, with a pair of imports — the renowned U.K. chef and restaurateur Raymond Blanc’s restaurant competition series, Last Restaurant Standing, and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and Gordon Ramsay’s F Word (where the “f” stands for “food”), featuring the antics of Gordon Ramsay, have become a welcome international treat.

“What makes some of our personalities so distinct are their British-ness and their view of their country and of the U.S.,” said BBCA senior vice president of programming Richard De Croce. “Th e ingredients and the measurements are often diff erent in the U.K. — or they may have the same ingredient but have a diff erent word for it — or use an ingredient we don’t use in the U.S., that’s why the talent and the personalities have to really drive the show. Is it someone you can’t take your eyes off ? Is it somebody that you’ll watch do anything, let alone cook?”

BBC America is now looking to bring U.K. culinary alchemist Heston Blumenthal, owner of the Michelin three-star restaurant Th e Fat Duck, and his science-minded approach to cooking to its developing lineup of food-based shows. “People come to us for something different, so we’ve really got to grab people with a tweak on the format,” said De Croce.

IFC is putting their indie-style spin on food with two eclectic series set to return on April 27: Food Party and Dinner With the Band, featuring New York chef Sam Mason.

“For us, it was all about the tone and the hosts,” said IFC executive vice president and general manager Jennifer Caserta.

Mason is an accredited chef, restaurant owner and James Beard Award winner, “but his approach to food is unique,” Caserta said. “He’ll do things like bell pepper martinis. It’s very indie, and he blends that with his love of indie music. With Food Party, its psychedelic sets and puppets and this adorable fringe artist host who takes you on this adventure based in food. We think of it as Rachael Ray meets Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

As food stars rise in the industry, hawking a cacophony of products — from aprons to Zinfandel — some showrunners fear overexposure threatens the very thing that made these personalities special in the first place: the cooking.

“I think celebrity raises a flag about anything that is artisanal,” said John Markus executive producer of TLC’s freshman competition docuseries BBQ Pitmasters, starring three-time char champion Myron Mixon. “I get worried about restaurants and product endorsements and all those things, because that’s what our culture promotes. It’s not enough that you do it well. You have to be famous for doing it well.”

With so many shows, is there a chance of audience burnout? Although viewers have yet to get their fill of food programming, no genre has been immune to oversaturation.

“My comeback to that is, ‘There’s always room for Jell-O,’” laughed Eileen O’Neill, president and general manager of TLC, where success has been sweet with Ultimate Cake-Off and Cake Boss, starring New Jersey baker Buddy Valastro. Th is spring, the channel whips up its latest show focused on America’s favorite foods and just announced filming on a series about a sister-owned cupcake shop in Washington D.C.

Added O’Neill: “The question is, Can good shows break through? The whole home-property arena went through a large expansion, and there are cultural issues that have taken away from that rather than exhaustion on the genre — with what we’re all going through with the economy —but food is so core to everybody that there’s a lot of real estate for it, and advertisers are looking to be a part of that world.”

That said, Bravo’s Berwick admitted surprise “at how broad the category has become, just looking at how many networks including the broadcast networks now, have food on,” she said. Television is offering today’s food fans a sensory experience that magazines and cookbooks can’t capture, said Travel Channel senior director of content Charlie Parsons.

“Really an important layer to it, quite frankly, is audio,” said Parsons. “In a magazine you can look at a delicious looking burger or dish, but you can’t hear the butter snapping and popping, you can’t hear the ‘Mmmm’s’ and ‘Oh my goodness!’ and all these comments from these people, you can’t hear the bubbling of the lobster when it’s boiled.

“It’s that audio experience that makes that dish — that makes that kitchen — jump off the screen and land in your living room. It becomes a much more emotional experience.”