by Allen Salkin
But, Brooke, Susie, and other executives were not ready to let go yet. This was Emeril—surely something could be done. Brooke assigned the Emeril Live production team hundreds of thousands of dollars to update the set. They moved it to a new studio, added a Viking range, and cut out his monologue, which allowed him to head straight to the kitchen, where he was most comfortable and his energy was highest.
Susie and her marketing team came up with a new overall network slogan that began appearing at commercial breaks: “Food Network: Way More Than Cooking.”
For three years, as the Emeril Live audience continued to age, programs such as Alton Brown’s half-hour on the science of food, Good Eats; the breakthrough competition show Iron Chef America; and The Next Food Network Star started to thrive and attract younger viewers. Susie, like other Food Network executives, noticed the change.
Then in 2007, a “Brand Lens Study” used focus groups inside and outside the network to distill the direction Food Network would have to take if it wanted to keep up with the more exciting programming emerging on other networks, especially Top Chef on Bravo. The report’s conclusions found many ways to say “Get out of the studio.”
Brooke talked to Emeril that year, speaking with her characteristic directness.
“I don’t know if the show can go on,” she told him in her gravelly voice. “I don’t know if we can afford the show anymore. The direction of the network may be changing.”
“You’re full of it,” he’d responded in a half-joking tone. She might be engaging in some kind of negotiating ploy for when his contract came up. “C’mon, the audience is getting a little older. The show will bounce back. This show is the network still. You’re not canceling it.”
He wasn’t getting it, Brooke realized. The network was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a week on Emeril Live. Other shows typically cost $40,000 an episode, including the star’s salary. So a whole thirteen-show season of a new series would cost what a week of Emeril cost. His price gave Brooke little room to make the rest of her talent roster happy. Ten years was a hell of a winning streak on television. Couldn’t Emeril see that? Bobby Flay had evolved. His good-natured new competition show, Throwdown, was easily beating Emeril Live in the ratings. Just as she had challenged Emeril, she challenged Bobby to come up with something new, and he had dreamed up the concept for Throwdown himself.
But Bobby was a consistent star, not the center of the network’s universe. How could Emeril be expected to believe she was serious?
In the last couple years, the show had booked younger musical acts and invited younger chefs to cook with him. It was a fertile gambit, but telling. A local deejay named Sunny Anderson, from New York’s Hot 97 FM, demonstrated a fried chicken recipe. She was charming and pretty and African-American, a group that was not well represented in the network talent. The producers and Susie gaped at her ease on camera. Soon Sunny had her own show, Cooking for Real.
Not long before the end of Emeril Live, Susie phoned Emeril’s talent agent Jim Griffin, a legend who represented Regis Philbin, Joe Namath, and Geraldo Rivera. It was a last-ditch effort to keep Emeril secure in the network stable and, perhaps, save Emeril Live. Susie wanted Emeril to become a regular competitor on Iron Chef America, the competition show that pitted two chefs against each other in an hourlong cooking battle in the center of a mini-stadium. Iron Chef America had a cult following and strong ratings among the viewers advertisers craved, eighteen to forty-nine years old.
Susie laid out the case to Jim. It would expose Emeril to a new generation, she told him. His original audience was getting old and he wasn’t attracting a new one. Iron Chef would lend Emeril an edginess. “I don’t want to lose him from prime time,” she said.
Jim wasn’t having it. “We don’t want Emeril in an aggressive situation like that,” Jim told her. He wanted Emeril to stay soft and safe, retaining his authentic cuddliness. Instead of pitting him in a battle royale against established Iron Chef competitors like the tattooed Clevelander Michael Symon and the kimono-wearing, histrionic Masaharu Morimoto, Jim wanted Food Network to invite new family-friendly guests to Emeril Live. He suggested Elmo, the Muppet from Sesame Street. Emeril had appeared with Elmo in 2001 in a home video called Elmo’s Magic Cookbook, which was, as the advertising noted, “an enchanting mix of whimsical songs and fun food facts” in which Emeril showed kids how to “take it up a notch” by shouting “Bam!” as they added toppings like broccoli to homemade pizza.
Susie hung up, exasperated. Elmo!
A few weeks before the end, Brooke brought Emeril in and told him straight up that the Emeril Live episodes he was taping were his last. The decision had been made. Ken had signed off on it.
He nodded and left her office, but to those around the network, he seemed to be acting as if it wasn’t going to happen, as if he believed something was going to change.
Ever since high school, working 11 p.m.–to–7 a.m. shifts in a Portuguese bakery in Fall River, Massachusetts, and sleeping in the afternoons between the end of classes and the start of his shift, Emeril had had a plan—what his next step would be, which chefs he would train under, what neighborhood he wanted as a location for his first restaurant, then his second and third. But on the day of his final episode he finds himself with no plan.
Over the next few weeks, he is racked by self-doubt. In addition to asking him to do Iron Chef, Brooke and Susie had tried to coax him to travel around the country for more out-of-the-kitchen segments on Emeril Live. They wanted him to connect with his audience, bring air and natural light to the show. Had he made a mistake, he asked himself, when he and Jim bucked those demands? They had protested that Emeril was a real restaurateur, not merely a TV personality like so many of the newer Food Network stars. It was crucial for his self-identity and his brand identity that he never stray too far from a working kitchen. He no longer had time to barnstorm around the country in a van with a TV crew, they argued. Emeril Live was like The Tonight Show, Jim had insisted to Brooke, a formula that was safe and working and did not need to fundamentally change.
Now Emeril thinks maybe he should have listened to Brooke and fought Jim. But a few weeks after the last day of taping for Emeril Live, Brooke calls him into her office again. The network has decided to end production on his other cooking show, Essence of Emeril, which had run off and on for twelve years.
This is too much. He stares at her, his eyes flaring, but he says nothing. So that’s how they are playing it, he thinks. They have hundreds of Essence and Emeril Live in the can. What do they need the real Emeril for when they have those hours of old Emeril to exploit?
He retreats to his restaurant in New Orleans and cooks on the line. Obviously the network is evolving, he thinks. Okay. But I don’t understand why it’s evolving without me being a part of it. I don’t know why I’m getting the door shut on me. I’ve given a lot of time and a lot of my life to build the network and paved the way for a lot of people.
When he is next back in New York, he sits in Susie’s office. They are talking about how he might fit into the future of the network.
“Maybe you should try doing something on Next Food Network Star, or maybe Iron Chef?” Susie asks him hopefully, not letting the idea go. She hates seeing this man she idolized unable to come to terms with this change, like an aging quarterback who cannot accept he was being benched. “How about that, Iron Chef?”
Emeril had built this network, had given it fifteen years of his life. When he started on his first show in 1993, How to Boil Water, Food Network was in 6.8 million homes. Now they are in more than 90 million. He had been here long before Susie arrived. Before Brooke. Rachael Ray had been barely removed from her job as a shopgirl selling candy apples at a counter in the basement of Macy’s when he’d been cooking for Leno and yelling “Bam!” on The Tonight Show, bringing in men, young women, and millions of viewers who had never dreamed they’d ever tune in to a cooking sho
w.
He helped people. He raised money for charity. All the hosts who came after him had sought out his advice on how to build their careers, how to be the best versions of themselves on camera. He’d seen their hunger, increasingly desperate in recent years as the stakes for success had risen: fame-grappling starlets who couldn’t make a piecrust from scratch and men with hair gel in their knife kits, all willing to fight like subway rats for a toehold in the fickle Food Network family.
Iron Chef. He is not going to kowtow to these people. He is not some novice cooking graduate grasping for a show before he’d worked a single shift in a professional kitchen.
“How about Platinum Chef?” he barks at Susie, walking out of her office, his rage, embarrassment, and fear bubbling over. “Have you thought of that?”
This was not the Food Network it used to be.
Starting from Scratch
Perhaps it should have been obvious that food would be a good subject for a television channel. The raw ingredients were all in place. In the early 1990s, cable television was typically delivering twenty-five or thirty channels, but the industry knew fiber-optic and satellite technology would soon allow it to deliver hundreds. There was an opening for new TV content, an American culture rife with niche interests to fill it, and an emerging class of experienced cable executives ready to experiment.
The thirty-channel universe had already proven it could be done: ESPN, MTV, and CNN had started in the early 1980s, and HBO in the 1970s. New, narrower proposals, were surfacing, hoping to land slots in the 500-channel universe: a 24-hour therapy and self-help network, an all-anthropology network, a history channel.
But the killer ingredient, a food-fascinated subculture, seemed to lie hidden. It took one of those special people, the kind of creative creature who is often a bit odd in any environment but can exist quirkily in the middle rungs of a corporate culture, great at ideas, less adept at company politics, to unearth what appeared to be, even to him at first, a crazy concept.
In 1975, when Joe Langhan started working as a cameraman at Colony Cablevision in his hometown of Woburn, Massachusetts, cable television was in its infancy. He’d recently graduated from the University of Massachusetts, and was selling rare coins and stamps for a dealer in Boston, and taking production classes at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge. One day he wandered past the local cable TV office on Main Street in Woburn, and saw a sign: TV Studio. “What is a TV studio doing in the middle of Woburn?” Joe asked himself.
It certainly sounded more interesting than selling old stamps. On pure impulse, Joe went in and asked the manager if there were any jobs; he even offered to start working for free. He was hired, for pay, and his first assignment was to videotape a high school football game. Joe, the son of a wholesale meat cutter, couldn’t believe his luck. He got to work in the open air with a camera and make something that would be broadcast on television! A year later, he became a production assistant, helping to cut the promotional videos that showed potential customers how easy it was to have cable installed: Look, folks, we don’t have to drill giant holes in your house!
In those days, cable TV subscribers did not expect much. They heard cable would improve the quality of their TV picture, and for a subscription fee of around $15 a month, they’d no longer have to climb onto their roofs to adjust balky antennas. Later, Colony sought to attract new customers and curry favor with the municipalities that had granted it exclusive licenses, by offering programming of local interest, such as sports and news. For some New Englanders, being able to watch a live minor-league hockey game at home on a cold winter night was a significant life improvement.
Over time, Joe made a name for himself as a guy who could get things done no matter what he was assigned. One day, he got a call from a Colony executive, who told him the company was considering developing a targeted local channel for its cable system in New Bedford.
“There are a lot of Portuguese people there,” the executive said. “Do you know a lot about the Portuguese?”
“I know Prince Henry the Navigator was Portuguese,” Joe said, answering honestly. “I learned that in high school.”
“Good, good,” the executive said. Any affirmative answer was good enough. “Do you think you can start some Portuguese programming down there and get Portuguese people to buy cable TV?”
“Sure, why not?”
In the new role, he bought foreign rights to soccer games and negotiated with Portugal’s national TV network to air its soap operas.
Then in 1984 came the Big Dan’s trial: six ethnically Portuguese men were going to be tried for the gang rape of a twenty-one-year-old woman in a New Bedford bar called Big Dan’s Tavern. The case had become a national news story because other patrons were said to have cheered as the woman was attacked on a pool table. The Portuguese immigrant population protested that the woman had acted lewdly and the treatment of the accused was motivated by bigotry. (The case would later become the basis for the 1988 movie The Accused, for which Jodie Foster would win an Oscar.)
Joe, by then the head of programming for all of Colony’s cable stations, suggested to the general manager of the New Bedford cable station, Paul Silva, that Colony should broadcast parts of the trial. Massachusetts had recently passed a law allowing cameras in courtrooms, and this was a big, controversial local story that would not be covered properly by the broadcast channels in Boston.
Colony was owned by the Providence Journal Company, and Paul contacted his superiors with Joe’s suggestion. “ProJo” was most closely identified with its excellent newspaper, which had been published daily since 1829, and it was a conservative company, more comfortable with its cable stations running local sports and dispatches from Boy Scout picnics than running reports on a rape trial. The company vetoed the idea, reasoning that if it showed a minute more of courtroom testimony from one side or the other, it could be accused of bias.
Paul gave Joe the bad news. But Joe knew he was right. “You’ve got to convince the guys at the Journal,” he beseeched Paul. The case was the only thing people were talking about. “We are the only people with local news in New Bedford and Fall River. People are interested in trials, they will watch trials. We have to cover this. You’ve got to convince them, Paul. You’ve got to convince them.”
Paul came up with what he thought might be a solution. With Joe’s help, he wrote a letter to the trial judge, Superior Court Judge William Young, asking if Colony could broadcast the entire trial, gavel to gavel. This would solve the problem of bias because the cable company would make no editing decisions. Judge Young would have full control and could decide to turn off the camera at any time. The judge agreed and so did ProJo—but not without sending the question all the way to the CEO, Michael Metcalf, who gave the final okay.
Soon CNN was showing parts of the trial taken from the Colony feed, and CNN liked it so much that a year later they ran seventy hours of the second murder trial of Claus von Bülow, who had been accused of poisoning his rich wife, Sunny. (Von Bülow’s acquittal was itself the basis of a movie, 1990’s Reversal of Fortune, for which Jeremy Irons would win an Oscar.) That, too, was such a success that in November 1990, a new cable network was announced that promised live and taped coverage of controversial trials. It would eventually be named Court TV. As far as Paul Silva and the executives at Colony headquarters were concerned, Joe Langhan had basically invented Court TV—not that anyone ever sent him a check for it.
By the early 1990s, Colony had grown into a midsize cable television provider operating systems throughout the country for 600,000 subscribers. Joe started a Spanish-language channel tailored for Cuban immigrants in Florida, developed local news shows in the Pacific Northwest, and researched Laotian programming for a proposed channel in Lowell, Massachussetts.
He looked every bit the bland middle-aged businessman from a small American city, wearing unflattering suits he bought at a discount store with dull ties and
white shirts. Joe lived alone in a run-down, two-bedroom ranch house in Westport, Connecticut, that he had bought after his divorce four years earlier. He had a state-of-the-art Proton television with a Sony picture tube and high-end electronics inside. With his wide brown eyes and a head of sandy, graying hair, which he combed down over his pale forehead, he could blend into the background almost anywhere. He did so in his own living room, where his skin and hair tones matched his beige hand-me-down couch.
On those nights when he wasn’t traveling, he typically went to a bar with a buddy to drink Budweiser and watch a Red Sox game. Dinner was usually pizza—Joe loved pizza and, from his years of traveling for the cable company, he knew nearly every pizza joint in the Northeast.
Pizza, really, was his only food interest.
—
One morning in the spring of 1991, Joe put on one of his sturdy two-piece suits and drove the ninety minutes from his ranch house to the annual gathering of the New England Cable Television Association at a Sheraton hotel on Goat Island, a half-mile-long bar of scrub and sand in Narragansett Bay connected to the mainland by a short causeway. It was there that Joe saw a narrow-faced man coming toward him, wearing a colorful abstract tie and a sharp blue suit. A few months earlier Trygve (“Tryg”) Myrhen (pronounced “Maron”) had been named CEO of the Providence Journal Company, the parent of Colony.
Tryg, a cable TV pioneer, had landed in Providence after resigning as the head of Time Inc.’s cable division. He had proved himself an adept businessman—he’d taken the cable division public in a $300 million IPO in 1986, and been involved in some of cable TV’s most significant launches, with MTV and E!—but he’d left two years after the IPO because of differences with Nick Nicholas, the parent company’s CEO. Both men understood what was happening in the media landscape, but had different ideas about how to exploit the expansion. Nick wanted to grow the cable operation by building pay television networks on the HBO model, and Tryg wanted to develop new advertising-supported channels in the mold of MTV and ESPN.