by Allen Salkin
Erica picked up Boggs’s show and told the host, to his glee, he could make monthly specials. On one of the first, Boggs interviewed Matt Lauer, who had just taken over as the cohost of the Today Show. The two had worked together when Matt was anchoring the local news in New York and Bill was a lifestyle reporter. The interview was done at one of Matt’s favorite restaurants, Blue Ribbon, in Greenwich Village. Over a lunch of oysters and salad, Matt, then forty and single, revealed that he liked nothing more than ordering the roast chicken with a glass of wine for dinner. It was another example of the new world of food the network was offering—real men don’t just drink beer and eat pizza; spending a night savoring fine food and French wine was a perfectly cool choice for an urban bachelor.
It was certainly an alternative to what one of the most popular TV comedies was presenting. In the final episode of The Drew Carey Show’s first season, Drew and his friends invented “Buzz Beer,” a coffee-enhanced beer. They marketed it with the slogan: “Stay up and get drunk all over again!”
Meanwhile, Emeril Live was still burning hot. That spring the network ran a promotion offering free tickets to upcoming broadcasts to anyone who called a toll-free number. Within minutes, so many calls were choking the line that the phone company had to shut down the Food Network’s service temporarily.
At the network’s May 1997 up-front presentation to advertisers, Erica told the Emeril story proudly. It was the first time a president could talk about the network being hot.
Erica launched what in the TV business are called “stunts” to inject excitement into the broadcast schedule. March 12, 1997, was “All Pasta Day.” She also started pushing Joe to ask her thoroughbred, Emeril, to do even more for the network—more episodes of Emeril Live, more episodes of Essence of Emeril, more personal appearances, more of everything.
“Emeril is already doing more than he can,” Joe protested. Having worked with Emeril and his team for years, Joe felt he had to protect the chef from the network making too many demands. Emeril was not being paid very much and his shows were valuable to the network, but Joe thought Emeril was more interested in spending time at his restaurants than in devoting more time to television and he felt that the most important consideration was not to drive Emeril away.
But Erica kept pushing Joe to push Emeril. Joe understood that things at the network needed fixing, but he believed some things did not. He stiffened and simply did not make the calls. Reese and Jeff Wayne, who were still on the Food Network board, were telling Joe that the board was not very happy with Erica. Joe, who’d seen three chiefs in two years, thought he might be able to outlast her reign and deal more easily with whoever was next in charge.
Erica was frustrated that Joe was not able to get more out of Emeril and threatened to quash the informal deal Reese had made with Shep allowing Emeril to mention his spices on the air. He could be more famous, she said, and richer. When Emeril protested that he did not want to fly around the country making more appearances to promote the network, because he wanted to spend time in his restaurants, Erica responded with the same faux pas that Reese had made early on, insulting the chef’s craft and using a lowbrow name for the profession.
“What do you want to do, be a cook all your life?” Erica asked.
“Yes, I do,” he said.
Soon there was only one recourse: money. “Okay, here’s the concept,” Erica told Susannah Eaton-Ryan, testing the idea. “If Emeril gets paid a million dollars, it doesn’t matter how long his deal is, or anything about it, but he can say he’s the first chef ever to get a million-dollar deal.” One million bucks—however big a stretch—would do triple duty: it would placate Emeril’s ego, tie him closer to the network, and demonstrate to cable operators, advertisers, and the public that the network was on a solid financial footing.
There was little dispute between the network and Emeril’s business manager, Tony Cruz, over the financial terms of the new contract. In exchange for being paid triple what anyone else was getting, Emeril would appear in around ninety episodes of Emeril Live a year, plus a certain number of episodes of Essence of Emeril. Betty was a trained accountant, not a lawyer trained in negotiation. But Tony, who had dropped out of accounting school before he went to work at Emeril’s New Orleans office in 1990, tried to extract the most for his boss’s talents and rising fame. At one point in the negotiation, over this contract or another, Emeril’s team inserted some language deep in a revision of the contract that would eventually grant Emeril the rights to all the episodes of Emeril Live and Essence of Emeril, past, present, and future. Nobody at Food Network got a deal like that. After all, the network was paying all production costs, so why should the star retain any rights?
Tony and the team knew the rights clause was a long shot, but they figured Food Network might either not notice it, or just give in. “They’re happy Emeril is not pressing for even more money than they are offering,” Tony thought. “Maybe they’ll think, ‘Hey, if he wants to keep the rights to some low-budget cooking shows that have questionable future value and will forgo some salary in exchange, it’s a great deal for us.’”
However it happened, when the smoke cleared, Emeril had won the rights to own his shows. In the years to come, this would come to matter a lot.
—
Another of Erica’s first moves was deciding not to renew Sue Huffman’s contract. Although Sue was titular head of programming, Sue’s main task had been to foster relationships with foodies, not to shape shows. She spent a lot of time having dinner and chumming up to chefs. She had forged important connections between the network and the food world elite, including Julia Child and Marion Cunningham, but Erica wanted to jazz the programming up, à la Emeril Live, and let her go.
Joe, vice president of production, liked this move at first. With Sue gone, he was clearly the senior programming executive in the hierarchy, and Erica was taking steps to free up money that promised to give him resources to bring in other deals like Two Fat Ladies. But he also noticed that when Erica discussed programming, she expressed disdain for the way the network had been doing things and the low production values. Joe thought she did not understand there were reasons many of the shows were cheaply made. Joe had been following Reese’s commands to make as many new shows as possible, avoid repeats, and do it all under a starvation budget.
Joe stewed quietly under the criticism, knowing that if he had more money he could do more. He also knew Erica was unlikely to get much more money for programming. She found this out herself at board meetings when she asked for more resources. Reese would explode at her, “This isn’t what you were hired to do!” She was going to destroy the network! And in the process, he let it be understood, ruin his chances of ever taking his profits. On this point, the other members of the board, some upset over her killing the Scandinavian deal, some weary of losses, agreed with Reese.
Erica started pressing Joe for more detailed accounting about how much was being spent on the production of each show. Joe tried to explain to her that most of the cost of producing each show was inextricably tied to the expense of keeping a full-time production studio staff at the network. The whole setup was to do nearly everything in-house, like a news operation, taping cooking shows all day and broadcasting live shows through prime time. The only cost unique to each show was the food—about $125 per half hour, not an amount it would be easy to trim.
Erica kept asking Joe for more explanation, asking how to slash each show’s individual budget. Joe, frustrated, began steering conversations away from programming and toward what he thought were areas Erica might be able to do something about if she wanted to tackle the dire state of the network’s finances—eighteen months behind earnings projections of the original business plan, he’d point out. For a time, Erica, whose title was CEO of the network, seemed to Joe to be properly occupied with nonprogramming matters like advertising, bringing in more cable providers, and—at least it kept her off his ba
ck—her office decoration. She was letting Joe operate as the go-to man at the top of the programming chain. But then Erica asked him and Susannah to start a search for a new VP of programming.
Joe was furious.
“We can’t let her bring in someone else!” he sputtered to Susannah.
Susannah tried to reason with him: “Joe, if it’s good for her, we have to do it. I’m not going to have private agendas.”
Characteristically, Joe tried to manipulate the situation from behind the scenes rather than risk confrontation. He felt he was owed the programming job. At least, he wanted things to stay as they were. He had started the damn network! He had come up with Emeril Live! But he never actually asked for the job. Instead, with every candidate Erica sent to them, he reported back unfavorably.
Erica, flabbergasted, decided to pick a candidate on her own. She was an admirer of television executive Geraldine Laybourne, who had led the transformation of Nickelodeon into a top-rated cable network with movie, toy, and theme park spin-offs. In the 1980s, Eileen Opatut had worked under Gerry when the network brought You Can’t Do That on Television, a Canadian sketch-comedy show with child actors, to the U.S. Whenever one of the actors on the show uttered the words “I don’t know,” a gush of chunky green slime would glop down onto their heads. Young viewers loved the show, especially the slime, and You Can’t Do That on Television became a foundation for the fledgling Nickelodeon to build on.
On that show’s heels, Nickelodeon’s programming team developed Double Dare, a game show that required families to answer trivia questions and occasionally perform stunts with slime. Double Dare and its slick but fun-loving host, Marc Summers, became essential after-school viewing for a generation. By the late 1980s, almost every show on Nickelodeon seemed to involve dousing children in green goop. Eileen, a New Yorker with a sardonic wit who was part of the Nickelodeon programming team, came to think of her place in the cable programming industry as “a Slimer.” She was now working for the BBC’s North American division, helping to sell its shows to other networks.
When Erica approached her about the programming job, Eileen said she was interested in moving back to the creative side, and admitted that she found Food Network difficult to watch at times. Some of the talent was good, but most of the shows were too similar. Nearly everything was shot in the same tiny studio, “Kitchen Central.” Every broadcast day looked like the next.
“The only difference is one day is pot roast, another day pasta,” Eileen said. The subject of food had vast potential, she argued, especially if the network could bring in outside production companies and shoot in different locations. “The network is not expressive of all food can be for all people.” Eileen liked the idea of supplanting a run of instructional in-studio cooking shows with programming that was more fun and free-ranging. Food does not get divorced, nor thrown in prison, but there had to be a way to inject more drama into it. Both Erica and Eileen agreed that Food Network should be aimed not only at those who loved to cook, but also—and more broadly—at those who liked to eat.
—
Not that Joe wasn’t already trying in his own way to stretch the programming. On Eileen’s first morning as Food Network’s vice president of programming in August 1997, she walked into a conference room and was stunned to find two men and a herd of dogs. She had just met the stars of Three Dog Bakery, a fitting introduction to the chaotic way shows were being acquired and produced. For every Two Fat Ladies, there were a handful of Three Dog Bakeries.
Eileen, eyes wide, backed slowly out.
Joe had brought the dog show to the network. In 1989, Dan Dye and Mark Beckloff had founded a retail shop called Three Dog Bakery in Kansas City, selling all-natural dog treats. Their dogs—Gracie the Great Dane, Dottie the Dalmatian, and a black Labrador named Sarah Jean the Biscuit Queen—were the faces of the company: Sarah Jean held the enviable title of Executive VP, Tummy Rubs. After Dan and Mark appeared to promote a cookbook on In Food Today, Joe had asked the pair to come to his office. “I love your energy,” he told them. “And I think that you guys could really do something. You are genuine, a little rough on camera, not super-polished, but that makes you interesting.”
They drove from Kansas City to New York with the big dogs in a van for the taping of their show. The only suitable hotel that would give rooms to the entourage was in Fort Lee, New Jersey, across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. It required a harrowing daily trip through traffic for the pack to get to the studio. By the time they arrived at 1177 Sixth Avenue, their energy was flagging.
There was little rehearsal or prep time. While they were having makeup applied, Dan and Mark received instructions about the premise of each of the day’s five or six shows—“Birthday cakes for dogs,” “Western medicine for dogs,” and the recipes: Grrrrrrranola, and German Shepherd’s Pie. The set was designed to match the aesthetic of the thirty-odd Three Dog Bakeries now franchised around the country—rawhide bones for door handles and cartoonish multilayer cakes adorned with biscuits. It looked like a very cheap, beige-and-brown version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. For dogs.
During taping, the hosts had to remain on slobber alert, keeping rags on their belts to wipe up any trails the elderly Great Dane left behind as she poached ingredients off the counter.
—
After stumbling onto the cast of Three Dog Bakery in the conference room, Eileen called the network staff together in the studio area to introduce herself. “I have an open office,” she told them. “If you have any ideas, I don’t feel competitive. I’m only as good as everybody’s ideas. So, please, if you’ve been thinking about anything and want to talk about it or you don’t like something, please tell me. You can tell me now or later on your own.”
The only one who spoke up was Matt Stillman, a production assistant who had started at the network a year earlier. His first job had been emptying the slop buckets from under the fake sinks, and he had since been promoted to managing the tape library for In Food Today and seating the audience for Ready . . . Set . . . Cook!
“I totally have ideas,” Matt said. “I’d like to talk to you.”
She looked at the twenty-four-year-old. He had black bushy hair and the kind of oil-brown Dr. Martens shoes artsy types were wearing in New York in 1997. Eileen had two toddlers at home, and Matt struck her as what they might look like grown up. She deduced from his features that he shared her Eastern European Jewish heritage, reading Matt as Yiddishkeit at first sight.
After the meeting, Eileen called Matt into her office. He told her he was taking night classes in comedic improv performance at the Upright Citizens Brigade. In college at the State University of New York at Geneseo, Matt had started a sketch comedy show called Nocturnal Transmissions, which had been broadcast on local cable. The show managed to be simultaneously clever and stupid, a kind of mind candy for geeks.
He told Eileen he thought the network too often treated its own viewers as stupid. Too many of the shows addressed people as if they had never cooked before. Even those that offered a peek into highbrow cuisine were presented in cheesy formats. Upright Citizens Brigade had always instructed improv actors to “play from the top of your intelligence.”
Eileen was nodding. “Yes,” she said. “I want to make smart television.”
“I think it’s better if you assume people are smart,” Matt went on. “This network could be for smart people.” He told her that even while he emptied slop buckets, his mind gestated ideas about offbeat, ambitious programming the network could try.
Their minds began to fuse. “Yes, that’s totally what I want to do.” Eileen smiled and nodded. This kid had a fresh point of view. “I need an assistant,” she said.
—
When Eileen said that she wanted the channel, reaching seventeen million homes in 1997, to appeal to those who eat, she meant humans, not dogs. After a production run of just thirty-nine episodes, Three Dog Bake
ry, Food Network’s only show focused on cooking for animals, was put to sleep.
Within her first few months, Eileen canceled many shows. She called the crew of Dining Around, the restaurant show starring Nina Griscom and Alan Richman, into a conference room. Eileen thought Alan a genius, but the show with its warmed-over fare and chintzy set, unbearable.
“We just want to let you know that ratings are a bit down,” she told the crew. “And with that, you know, we had to look at the expenses of the show and, we’ve decided to, to uh, discontinue Dining Around.”
There were gasps in the room, shock from those who had worked hard to deliver the best show they could for three years. They had developed a micro-culture replete with inside jokes about the peccadillos of the stars, a certain way of doing things, gossip, flirtations, and artistic effort expended on a starvation budget. Zzzfffwipp! All of it, gone. Most of the crew of Dining Around, Three Dog Bakery, and the other killed programs would find other TV gigs, other little work families, to join. Some were on staff, others freelancers who would not find their way to Food Network again. For some, those shows, small as they were, stale as the food could be, would be the most fun they’d have in their careers. Others would nearly forget they’d ever worked on them.
Under Eileen, the programming department developed a rule: every program had to show food within the first thirty seconds, grabbing the viewer by the stomach. She continued Reese’s policy of forbidding credits at the end of shows, but this was less to protect moonlighting crew members than to squelch any signal to the viewer’s brain that this TV meal was ending. Seamlessly, a new show would start and there again, in the first thirty seconds, would be the image of something delicious, an apple pie à la mode, a beef shoulder with sage.