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.

As Next FN Star Returns, High Expectations for Season Four

I have high expectations about this year’s The Next Food Network Star. That’s not to say I don’t have my fingers crossed. And that’s not to say I’m not fully prepared to be let down.

Let me put this another way: My normal modus operandi, the way of operating I’ve found best works for me in life in these situations is not to get overly high expectations and then be let down. Much better to have lower, more reasonable ones and then events either tend to meet that average or, when things work well, exceed them.

But I do serously have hopes — based on what I’ve so far seen and read — that this might be the best season yet. Well it’s not only Food Network’s long distain for a more successful show elsewhere with the initials T.C., it’s that it looks like instead of standing in a corner whining, that this time out someone actually took notes and made adjustments. Yes, actual action instead of mere talk for a change.

First up, the rules have not changed. You cannot have had a national cooking show before. We know this rule from last year when one of the constestants had a local television show somewhere, you know, the kind if 300 people watching. Amazingly he was not the most comfortable person in front of the camera with all that experience behind him. Big change I guess between a camera in your kitchen and a multimillion dollar stage set with a crew of 20 in the room instead of just your brother-in-law Bob behind the camera. Oh yeah, and he was the sole one with so-called “media experience” last year. And you could sure tell it.

Let’s face it, Amy was sweet. Amy was also boring as all hell. Yeah they gave her six and another six and was offering her more, and she’s the one who declined (huh?) but so be it. I mean come on, The Neelys and Sunny Anderson each wowed me at their first episode. It would have taken Amy about five more years to get to that stage, and that doesn’t happen anymore. Bobby Flay and Emeril Lagaese are where they are because they’ve been doing this for over a decade. When you look at their early stuff, they and Amy were on par. But the Food Network is no longer a tiny hobby shop and the audience (myself included) no longer willing to wait for some one to get on the job training. You either got it or you don’t. No one on NFNS last year had it. Even Alton last year on camera asked at one point if they could just start the show over with a different bunch of contestants.

Back to that rules have not changed thing. So no one ever said you couldn’t have other experience, better cooking experience for instance. No one said you couldn’t be a real cook or a real chef or work in a real restaurant. Just that you couldn’t have had a national cooking show. So this year, when you look at the bios, the contestants resumes, you see something special. You see what I’d like to refer to as creds. Cooking and or performance of some kind. Or a combination. This is a major step up. And the nice thing is nothing here eliminates a potential Rachael or a Paula-wannabe or a Fieri-in-the-raw from being found. There’s room for those as well as executive chefs and restaurant owners with killer food skills and also an inviting TV personality.

And that is exactly where this show has been needing to go since it’s inception. I mean come on, the “Hearty Boys” were like some bad SNL parody of PBS cooking shows or of the old-time cable access programs. Amy was sweet and talented but still very flat and boring. Guy was the standout, and if this show had produced three like him in three years it would have been major by now. But one out of three did not cut it. Again, this new, better crop of contestants and better picking of finalists is key. Add to that better editing and smarter thinking. The heavy showing of top chefs — not just cooks, but names and not just names of hosts, but bona fide chefs — also helps out this year. Having Bobby Flay take over the (sorry, it’s impossible not to have comparisions) the “Tom Colicchio” role adds both a cohesiveness and an authority that this program was sorely lacking.

Sorry Bobby and Sue, (Susie Fogelson and Bob Tuschman,) but other than this show do we really know you? No. You’re admitted pencil-pushers; you’re both “The Man”. You’ve designated yourselves from the get-go as saying we serve the function of being corporate. Somehow that’s neither warm and fuzzy nor, despite what you may think, very authoritative. As you both come off as being genuine and are likable, you can stick around. (As though you’d actually have it any other way, huh.)

One more smart move is what they’re doing after the show. I know whoever the winner is of this event will have their cooking show starts four weeks after. Imagine that! Actually riding the massive publicity wave created with an immediate show! Common sense for the first time in four years. Amazing. As opposed to the last three years when the winner’s show would premiere six months later - long after all the hub-bub died and no one any longer cared a damn. (Who is it that’s new at FN? Hiring people with brains lately.) Yes, as said, they put some thought into it this year and have apparently made the necessary changes required. Let’s hope whatever wunderkind who utterly destroyed their internet promotions doesn’t mettle into anything else. This season’s Next Star looks like a revamped train, a bullet train instead of the old choo-choo, but it doesn’t take much to derail such a thing.

As said, I have high expecatations for NFNS this season. Now let’s see if it let’s me down or lives up to the hype. Crossing fingers.

Catch the premiere episode tomorrow — Sunday — night on the Food Network channel at 10pm Eastern.

Food Network Achieves Impossible: How to Unviral a YouTube Campaign

Now, what was supposed to happen, was the folks at Food Network were supposed to release 10 video interviews that were then going to appear here on this site, two each day for the entire week so you could see and meet the contestants of the upcoming — Sunday night, in fact — Next Food Network Star (NFNS). You know, similiar to what we did with Top Chef, except that we had no problem with the Top Chef crew making things available, and so when we did it with Top Chef it was a great week-before send off. The kind NFSF wanted, but then dropped the ball completely on. Unlike Top Chef.

You see, I’m repeatedly saying “Top Chef” over and over again because that really irks the brass over at Food Network to no end. And since they’ve screwed up their promotion, their promises, totally disappeared for parts of last week and this week, didn’t returned emails (very unusual) and have even managed to un-viral a viral campaign, I figure they very much deserve to be as annoyed as they’ve made me. Oh yeah, did I happen to mention “Top Chef” at all?

So where was I? Ah, yes …. No idea what happened, except two folks there went on vacation, one stopped answering emails and another said he couldn’t send us anything because they weren’t sending him anything to disseminate. Ah, nice way to start things off, FN. In fact, speaking of screw ups. The Food Network has won the prize as being the first television network to release a video to You Tube that … ready for this? … couldn’t get 700 hits in over three weeks!

That’s right! My baby nephew could get more hits in a week vomiting on camera than the Food Network with big bucks being played. And why? Because some lunatic at Scripps made the video at da Tube unsharable!!!! ….. Well, duh, grandpa! Oh and not merely unsharable, also unrateable, unable to leave comments. These are all the things why it’s called a social network. It’s what puts the V in “viral”. Why be on YouTube at all? It’s the 21st century version of getting 10 million handouts made at the printer and then putting them in the trash upon delivery. It’s like taking out an ad in the telephone book and not giving an address nor a telephone number. We’re basically talking “Rain Man” here, and K-Mart is not the only thing that sucks.

So, yeah, to whatever geezer at Food Network said yeah, let’s do viral marketing, but take away the ability to go viral … congrats, pops. Go back to your Stone Age land line, rotary-dial phone and your black-and-white non-cable television with the rabbit ears on it and take a nice long nap. Cause whoever you are, you manged to not break a thousand, not even break 700 on freaking YouTube over the better part of a month!!! Trust me: That takes major skilllz! The same skills as running the wrong way for a touch down, but skills nonetheless. And hey, that’s monumental for a television network. Seriously this deserves … something. Dunno what …. a Golden Clog or a Darwin Award? Or maybe a certificate or special citation from Broadcast and Cable or Advertising Age in terms of sheer stupidity.

Now that I’ve sufficiently embarrassed some head honcho that should be put to pasture, let’s hope the actual food challenge show does better than the lame as hell Internet marketing. It would have to though wouldn’t it. Btw, I had to go through hell and back to get the video you see below. Yes the one below is essentially the same exact video on YouTube that has no traffic on it. And I did it all legally. And with the blessing of the folks at the Food Network. (See, I’m not mad at all of them. O contraire, it’s frustrating for me to see a lot of the marketing and publicity and other folks work their tails off and yet these other things keep happening. That’s how I know there has to be some kind of left hand slapping the right hand thing going on. It makes no sense other wise. The folks there doing their jobs are great. It’s obviously someone else who put on the brakes, overriding things and making the bad calls. And that’s the guy I’m mad at. Not the other folks.

Btw, do I actually know this is how it is? No. But I’ve been around the block a long time. I’ve worked for small companies and for multinationals. I know how things are and how life is. When I hear a band of the earth is going into night during the day for 15 minute periods across a meridian I do not have to look up to the sky and see it’s an eclipse. If supply is equal to demand in a certain commodity, and there’s no foreseeable future turmoil and suddenly the price goes up radically, I don’t have to be actually be there in some clandestine board room to know price-fixing is going on; you see, I have a brain. And when a company or a department in a company is doing something right, then suddenly everything stops, or goes in reverse or just plain suddenly goes stupid (and there’s been no change in personnel) then it’s some loony toon in upper management who can’t pee straight who’s decided to poke his or her nose into someone else’s urinal.

Anyways it took great lengths to get this vid and then get it into a web-based (but still unsharable, sorry) form. But at least one food site — this one — finally got it on their site. In fact, it took such great lengths. I’m not even making it a part of this justifiably complaining post. I’ll give it’s seat all by itself in another one. The way it deserves. Tomorrow.

The Day The Cooking Died … It Was Today on ‘The Rachael Ray Show’

I only discovered this “show in a show” at the very end (thankfully). Apparently for the past bunch of Mondays, The Rachael Ray Show has been having a cooking competition called “Hey, Can You Cook?“. This morning was week four of four and the day they crown the winner. Apparently it began with five contestants and we lost one each week. If you’re that interested in a chronology of events, visit the link above. Otherwise, for me, I’m just talking about the last show … because if I had to actually look at any of the others I’d no doubt hurl.

Yes yesterday the cooking died on television when (and it’s scary when you really can’t blame the contestant) some guy won a challenge by making hot dogs and scallops as his (to quote Rachael) fine dining upscale challenge. The contestant he beat out made hot dogs and spaghetti in case you were curious.

Oh and Gordon Ramsay was there as judge. Yes, Gordon next to Rachael. And there he was judging a (cough, choke, spew) “haute cuisine” challenge. Wow payback really is a b***h. (Go check out the video here where he talks about Rachael as the woman who abbreviates things and puts food in her breasts — referring to the way she gets the food out to prepare on her cooking show.)

Even so, I still felt sorry for him, I mean: dogs with pasta, scallops and weiners. I think I’m going to lose it.When he saw what they were going to cook and what he was going to eat he said “Oh, my”. I know how much he wanted to say something more appropriately Ramsayian like “**** me!” — because he was, basically.

The guy who won gets a trip to Paris and four days at a French cooking school. I can’t wait for them to ask him “and what meal did you make that got you here?” Hopefully when he replies the culinary instructors don’t all die from strokes and embolisms.

(Apologies to Don McLean!)

How the contestants really tried
with their hotdogs cooked and fried
Rachael this I can’t abide
The day the cooking died

Oh bye bye my homemade baked pie
scallops and weiners just made me cry
need a stomach pump and an ambulance ride
Screaming “this’ll be the day that I die;
Oh, this’ll be the day that I die.”

‘Hell’s Kitchen’ is Getting More Unreal

You know, over the years, and espeically this one, there’s been a lot of talk about how Hell’s Kitchen is faked, scripted, edited to trick, you name it. Here’s just a couple. First from a blog:

Kitchen was never quality TV—it was never even quality compared to other reality TV shows. But now it’s almost unbearable. Almost every second of it is over-the-top, and many parts are quite obviously scripted.

And another from a magazine article:

Gordon Ramsay’s cooking show on Fox, Hell’s Kitchen, has been widely panned for a number of elements that seem staged and disingenuous

There’s hundreds more, but that’s enough for now to give you an idea. As for me, well, I don’t usually think about it. I pretty much just go with the show and think of it as a sinful enjoyment, like that giant dessert after dinner that is going to push me past the full line and make me pay for it later that night.

And then last night I saw something that just makes zero sense. That too much broke the logical pattern. Remember how gum-shoe extraordinaire Lt. Columbo would start out with looking at the crime scene and realizing the victim apparently acted in a manner that defied his or her personality. And what that meant was, in other words, they didn’t do do it. If the victim didn’t do it, then a murderer did do it. It wasn’t a suicide after all.

That’s what happened on last night’s show that revolved around the California Sweet 16 Party and Rosann. The most important meals of the night were from the girl’s table and the two most important of those would be the hostess of honor, the girl having the birthday and her picky mother. The girl ordered filet mignon medium-rare. Rosann made it. The camera caught it. It was perfect by the way.

Then it comes back from the girl as too rare and Ramsay does his signature bitch-off freak-out. Whoa! Stop the bull—-!

One: The camera caught it, it was perfect. Two: We know this sixteeen year old girl has no idea about food. And I recall how I was (as a lad) younger. To be hip you order something really bloody, and then find you need it a lot more done. It’s part of growing up. It’s part of the maturing of the palette. Obviously the steak was fine, and the girl didn’t get it. Ramsay is not an idiot, he would get this. But here’s the third and final part, that is unmistakable: Ramsay would quadruple check the VIP’s steak before it went out. That’s Ramsay. Suddenly are we to believe he let that go from the pass? That “his standard” of checking went out the window? Fact is though Ramsay would never never never had let that go out. Columbo knows that. And hey, don’t forget we caught it going out on camera too.

So fine, customer sends it back. Customer is always right. Do it over. Not a biggie. Blame and scream at Rosann? Insane! Worse, when he say he wants it now. What? Does Ramsay’s voice change the Laws of Physics itself by his whim? Can a steak that take x-amount of time speed up because he screams curses? Of course not. Even a ravingly-insane Ramsay knows this much. But he yells at Rosann again and continues and she ends up on the chopping block at the end of the show. …. I’m starting to smell so much manure in the kitchen the health department needs to close the set down.

Come on. As time goes on I start to like this show less and less. I mean I use this show sort of like A-Team and other stupid guilty pleasures of the past. The kind of show you watch for fun of it without using much gray matter. But just like Murdoch couldn’t make an atom bomb from a pencil, Ramsay woudn’t send out under cooked steak to anyone let alone the most important diner of the night. Keep pulling this kind of crapola, and HK is going to end up off my watch list soon.

Did you hear me, Donkey? Yeah Ramsay, I’m talking to you, big boy. Straight up or **** off now back to yer little rock, right. That goes for you too Granada America. You’re the producers. You want to hire moron sous-chefs each year? Fine. You want to start treating the viewing audience as morons? Trust me, it will be you hanging up your coat and going home soon.

Seriously, this is a show I once gave four-stars out of five. It’s a show for the past couple years I couldn’t wait until next week to see what happened. As said, I didn’t treat it as a cooking or a food show, I treated it as a competition and, as said, a guilty delight. Yeah, they are idiots, yell at them, they deserve it. And let the good cooks rise to the top and get the well-deserved rewards of their effort. (Rewards which is seems only one of the last three winners got, by the way.)

But like a lime zester, this show starts grating more and more (and not in the good way). And the yells are the same, but now they yell for no reason or for trumped up ones. You can’t always tell the good from the bad contestants because the editing has gotten sneakier and can now hide a bad contestant’s mistakes making you think they are fine, and manipulate a good contestant into thinking she’s an idiot when she’s not.

I don’t like my chain yanked. And I’m quickly liking this show less and less each week. My four-star ranking is now three stars and already that’s sinking.

Btw, even the website lies folks. Want to (for some insane reason) actually audition for next season’s Hell’s Kitchen? According to the website you can and there’s a link. But — too late! — in actuality the current fourth season and next year’s fifth season were filmed back-to-back. That’s right! You think it’s strange enough that what your watching now was done in October? Imagine when it’s June 2009 and the show finished shooting by the end of December 2007 huh. LMAO!

Yeah, it’s getting so nothing about this show is what it seems to be. Very sad. Time to empty it into the trash can and kick it hard.