New Planet Green Kills Off Discovery Home; Several Cooking Shows Gone

I am surprised and very very annoyed on a couple levels.

I knew from many months ago that Planet Green was coming. Turns out it’s one of the very first posts I made here, that Emeril Live was through production on the Food Network and that the Cajun with the Big “E” and “bam” was starting a new summer time show on a new summer-time launched channel called Planet Green from the Discovery network.

I had no idea until yesterday that it was ever going to replace another channel. I thought it was a new addition. Never in any writings I came across in the past half year did I see “Planet Green which will replace/kill the Home Channel”. Never saw it. So I literally never saw it coming. Until it was over, until the deed was done. Now I’m majorly annoyed. Pissed even. Not only for what has gone, but for good what has gone could have been.

Let me tell you what I mean. Basically, we Americans alas get only American programming. Oh sure, we get our fill of the Brits via BBC America, and that is majorly cool. But overall, we live in our own little bowl and forget there’s an entire world out there. Mind you, not all of the cooking shows came from outside the US on the Home Channel, but some did.

So besides having to say good bye to the non-cooking shows I enjoyed such as Toolbelt Diva and Holmes on Homes and some other good non-food content …

Goodbye License to Grill with host Rob Rainford. A show from Canada that this channel did keep picking up new seasons, so they showed three or four years worth of Bob, though not the last year. Along with Bobby Flay’s shows his made for the two best griiling and BBQ shows around! He’s still on Food Network Canada, a lot of good that does me.

Goodbye Chef at Home with Michael Smith (I really enjoyed this show) — another Canadian show — mind you they were too stupid to buy any of the last three seasons of his show so we kept watching ones from 2004 and 2005, but I liked them anyhow. At least, again he’s still shown in Canada, but no help to me.

Goodbye Inner Chef with celeb chef Marcus Samuelsson and owner of Aquavit restaurant. One of the top chefs in NYC. With that unique blend of specializing in Ethiopian and Scandanavian. Yeah he did the help at home type show, but was anyone ever so overly qualified? I mean that in a good way. Wow.

Goodbye to Cookin’ in Brooklyn with Alan Harding. Not a favorite by any stretch, I probably watched it less often than the others. Still I really did enjoy that quirky, off-beat way the host was and how he did the show. It was a definite original. And often enjoyable; I just had to be in a mood though to see it or not.

 

Semi-Sorta-Half-Hearted-Goodbye to Take Home Chef. It’s only semi because — whew! — Curtis Stone and his show are mainly on Discovery’s TLC (The Learning Channel) and just made extra apperances on the Home Channel. So this show is thankfully still around!

Goodbye to that show — I had to look this up for this article the name didn’t even stick in my mind — to Simply Magic with Kylie Kwong — the one show I will not miss one iota. Kwong’s voice was always so irritating and grating. And I could never ever get into her recipes. And even if I had I would never have been able to make a single one of them. You see, she specialized in Australian meets Chinese food … you want to talk about two cuisines who’s ingredients she used that you never heard of before and will never find here in the States! Now if you could find the Chinese ones — and she used some wild stuff I’d never heard before or even seen at the good Chinese stores here — then you surely would never never find the Aussie ones.

But you know, even this I will miss in a small way, because it was different. Very different. Chinese-Australian fusion? Might be a very normal thing 17,000 miles away from here, but it’s anything but normal here. And so showing it … I greatly appreciated that!

I said I was annoyed on a couple levels. The second level is all that the Home Channel never did. Why did it keep showing the same shows over and over. Why did it rarely get new seasons of shows that were popular? Why did they do such a lousy job in other words? Now while sure, on one level you might be saying — and you would be right — well then good enough they shut up and are no more as they didn’t do a good job did they? In that sense, true enough. They really did basically take some foreign content, tossed it up on a wall, saw what stuck and let it hang there. They never worked it to it’s full potential. Hell, they never worked it to even it’s minimum potential. They never worked it period.

But … what a wonderful window they opened! One I don’t want shut. Why doesn’t someone come fill this void? Food Network? PBS? Someone else? Why not take these cooking shows from Britain and Canada and Australia and wherever else and put them on American television for us to watch? Why not let us see what’s happening elsewhere. Oh I know, the Celsius to Farenheit thing is a pain, and the mililiters instead of ounces is even worse, but I have a solution: they have these things since 1949 where you can actually put words at the bottom of the screen. You might have seen it. Hint hint.

Look at what the original Japanese Iron Chef being shown here caused … a sensation and a highly-rated spin off or two. And as said, were it not for License to Grill, there pretty much would just have been Bobby Flay and that very annoying guy on PBS as the only ones rubbing and mopping. More points of view, more different culinary skills are appreciated. And desired.

So how about someone out there pick up the slack? Pick up the food shows the Home Channel killed off and go out there and pick up some more foreign cooking shows and expand our palates and our horizons. Don’t you think it’s a damn shame someone like me has to ask this? Don’t you think it ashame PBS or Food Network or whomever you are that you haven’t been doing this already? If you’re not ashamed, you really really should be.

And Discovery, thanks — and thanks for nothing too.