by Allen Salkin
“And by the way,” he said, trying to defuse their anxiety with a joke, “pay no attention to that convoy of pickup trucks circling the building downstairs and the rumors that you’re all moving to Knoxville next week.”
Maybe they weren’t all moving immediately, but Susan Stockton was asked to fly to Knoxville and check out the studios and the local food scene in anticipation of producing cooking shows in the Volunteer State. She discovered a fast-food hell. Chains and more chains, all serving food trucked in frozen by mega-suppliers from Chicago. You could buy butter and flour, but almost no fresh vegetables could be found at the markets. There was no Chinatown for interesting produce, or Little Italy for fine grades of pasta flour. Finding an apple that didn’t break apart in your mouth like dry pebbles was a challenge. And fresh seafood? Fuggedaboutit.
Back in New York, she reported to Erica Gruen, “We really limit ourselves down there. We can do baking shows, but I can’t get vegetables. I can’t get bok choi.” Plus there was no food culture, so there were few chefs around to bring in for guest stints.
It was a hard argument to dispute, and Ken saw its logic. HGTV was a Middle America channel spreading a native you-can-do-it gospel so home owners could take on building projects and urban dwellers could enjoy the fantasy of yard work. Knoxville had hardware stores and rhododendrons aplenty. High-end cooking was still an art form best practiced in the major cities on the coasts. Urbanites who could score fresh grouper and suburbanites entranced by the foodie life watched Food. Ken’s colleagues at Scripps weren’t food people and were not likely to comprehend why the network should stay where it was. Cincinnati was a city whose main culinary claim to fame was a local form of (admittedly delicious) chili served over spaghetti with a mound of grated cheddar cheese.
At a meeting with CEO Burleigh, Ken asked for time to let things settle before making big moves with Food Network. “Look, I know I told you initially that we’d be producing a lot of programming in Knoxville,” Ken told him. “But we’re gonna tear the hearts and guts out of the place in New York.”
Ken was already figuring he would need to install someone more familiar with the Scripps way to transform the network. He asked Erica to stay on, perhaps for as long as a year, keeping her management team in place, while he figured out how to best digest the acquisition. Hiring someone immediately in New York made little sense if the network was going to be forced to move to Knoxville.
Erica did love the job she had held for about a year and a half, but understood how unlikely it was that she would keep it with the ownership turnover. She agreed to stay for the year, keeping the agreement private, but insisted she be paid for the entirety of her five-year contract.
Burleigh told Ken he could have a bit of time, but that the sooner things moved to Knoxville, the better. Ken continued to stall, allowing designers to draw up plans for Food Network’s new kitchens and slowly migrating some of the business and technical operations to Knoxville.
—
Joe Langhan was listening carefully to Ken’s speech to the Food Network staff. Less concerned about a geographical move, he was keen to know what personnel changes Ken might make at the top. What Joe heard disappointed him: Erica and Eileen would be staying. The buyout left Joe without his old ProJo patrons. Reese was still a part owner and on the Food Network board, but Scripps could now outvote him on anything. Jack, Jeff Wayne, and Tryg were out. With or without Eileen and Erica, Joe understood that Scripps would never promote him to a big programming job. Food Network was not going to be a seat-of-the-pants operation anymore. It was getting corporate, and Joe had no allegiances within this new corporation.
Eileen made efforts to involve Joe in what she was doing on the programming side, but his resentment at being passed over for her job had calcified. Still trying to find a role for him, she asked him one day, “Who do you want to work with?” He mumbled something and wandered off. Longtime staffers told her how creative Joe was, what good ideas he always seemed to have, but Joe treated her with seething silence.
She finally told Joe that if he didn’t open up to her, his job was in danger. At network planning meetings in late 1997, Eileen was told that the network had overspent the year before and that new ownership was not yet opening the spigot, so the programming budget would be especially tight, just $10 million. Unsaid was that the overspending was at least partly Joe’s fault.
He was increasingly convinced that no one wanted to hear his ideas anymore. Erica and Eileen, and now Ken, had their own ideas about how it was going to go, and it didn’t matter what he thought. He would not help Eileen calculate budgets for the in-house shows, making it nearly impossible for her to figure out what she could do with the $10 million.
After months of buildup, Eileen called him into her office. “This is not working out,” she said. It would be better if he resigned, she said, and a severance package could be worked out.
Waves of shock coursed through him. Joe walked out of the building without telling anyone what had happened. He phoned George Babick, who met him for lunch; two of the original hands at TVFN. Joe had started the network, the website, and Emeril Live. His severance was about $100,000—nine months’ salary.
A few days after he left, Eileen asked Matt to call everyone on the thirty-first floor in to the conference room.
“Should I get Joe?” he asked.
“No. Don’t get Joe,” she said.
Eileen addressed the staff. “We’re really appreciative of how much Joe has done for the network,” she said. “But we’re going in a new direction, and he’s out, effective immediately.”
There was no farewell party, no toasts to what he had accomplished. When he returned the many calls on his answering machine, the friends and colleagues who had barely been able to reach him for four years because he was working so hard were outraged at how he’d been treated. He should have been paid millions, they said. He should sue.
“That’s the television business,” he told those who called. Joe was like one of those Yankee tinkerers who are always working on ten different projects in their basement workshops, only rarely lifting their heads to survey the bigger picture. “Things change fast,” he explained to friends. “You can be pushed out anytime.”
As Erica tells it, Joe returned to the network for one more meeting with her, during which he demanded he be further compensated with an ownership stake. “The Food Network was my idea and I am owed a piece of it,” Erica recalled Joe saying.
She recalled asking what he meant, and that he said Sue Huffman and George Babick had gotten pieces and he wanted his. She replied that it wasn’t hers to give.
Joe disputes this recollection, saying no such meeting ever happened. In fact, Joe insists that he had an agreement entitling him to a tenth of one percent of the network, negotiated years earlier with the start-up consultant Stephen Cunningham—not long after Joe had asked Reese for a stake and been rebuffed. Joe says he was in line to collect on this stake should Reese ever sell out. It would therefore make no sense that Joe would come around the network asking Erica for what he already had.
Steve has no memory of such an agreement from the early days.
“I started thinking, well, jeez, what am I going to do now? . . . I mean, you’re upset a little bit—in a lot of ways. But then on the other hand, I was never the type, under any circumstances, just to sit around and mope about it. Even within the company, when one of the projects I was trying to develop or create didn’t work, or somebody killed it or something, I didn’t sit around and mope about that. I just went to the next one.”
—JOE LANGHAN
A creative and hardworking genius who could fight like hell behind the scenes for a project he believed in, Joe had certainly never been adept at championing himself. In the hours and days after he left the network, Joe was left to think about the difference between an “intrapreneur” and an “entrepreneur.” An intrapreneu
r was someone who invented things for the company he worked for. He didn’t get rich or any control over what he invented, but he got a salary for as long as the company wanted him around. An entrepreneur was like Reese, who owned what he created, or a good part of it, and could control his own time. Joe decided he would go the entrepreneur route from here on out. It was too late to get a big piece of what would probably be his greatest creation, but he tried to move on. He did ask for and receive from Reese some office space to start on a new project he had in mind related to licensing digital music.
—
About a month after the purchase, Ken flew Food Network’s top managers down to the Great Smoky Mountains for a retreat with the managers of HGTV. It was not unlike sending the Little Rascals to the Little House on the Prairie. A bus met Erica, Eileen, Susannah, Joe Allegro, Rich Gore, and Heidi Diamond at the Knoxville airport and whisked them to Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tennessee.
Ken was at the door of the Blackberry Farm lodge to greet them. He addressed the two groups, HGTV and Food Network, cheerfully. “Okay, your mom and dad just got married. And you’re one family now. So you guys are going to have to get along.”
Later that evening, everyone was asked to gather around a campfire and sing songs together. The New Yorkers exchanged looks. A campfire? Heidi’s Prada heels were of no use here. “Let’s sing ‘Rocky Top Tennessee!’” one of the HGTV people suggested. Someone from the operations department at Scripps took a guitar out and played the country chestnut as his colleagues sang along.
The New Yorkers were trying not to let their eyes pop out of their skulls. “Is this what they call a hootenanny?” snickered one. Joe Allegro gamely took a turn on the guitar. He played “Piano Man” by Billy Joel.
The Scripps people exchanged their own looks. “Makin’ love to his tonic and gin?”
Breakfast the next morning was country huge. The Food Network people poked at the grits. Ken suggested to Eileen that the chef at Blackberry Farms would make a good cooking show host. She found him bland. The Food folk nervously joked that the weekend was like the episode of The Twilight Zone in which seemingly benevolent aliens come to Earth “to serve man” and end up eating everyone. “They’re going to have us for dinner,” the Food people whispered, worried that the weekend was a formality and that they’d all be canned at the end of it.
Although they were not fired or filleted, the Food people left believing that Scripps did not understand them and this marriage wasn’t going to work. The retreat was a disaster. Ken knew it, too. Food Network had had three owners in two years. The staff distrusted ownership. Most of them wanted to keep doing it their way. They feared losing their identity.
Ken started thinking more pointedly about who might replace Erica, someone more Rocky Top. Keeping the peace was not easy. In the weeks that followed the retreat, nearly every time Ken asked Food Network executives to consider something, he was told why it wouldn’t work. A few weeks after the retreat, he got tough during a meeting back in New York.
“You know what?” he said. “You have to understand something. We bought you, okay? We now own you.”
The city folk understood that straight talk. Soon, they saw that there was at least one advantage to being owned by Scripps: the company would spend money. Scripps did agree to increase the Food Network production budget between 10 and 15 percent. It wasn’t a huge leap—Ken was still deciding whether he would be able to keep it in New York—but it was something, and programming executives ran with it. The network made plans to produce 1,200 episodes of original shows during 1998—none of them in Knoxville—and in the spring announced it had three new series ready to go on-air, nine in development, and new episodes of Two Fat Ladies.
Eileen and Erica began to focus more clearly on dividing the broadcast day between daytime and prime time, just as most networks did. Cooking shows were always considered solid daytime fare, so they had that covered. The question was what to put on in prime time. Emeril Live pointed the way. Other prime-time shows should be similarly fast-paced and entertainment-driven—a formulation Erica described to a reporter as “TV Food Lite,” which did little to mollify critics of the changes at the network.
The new focus allowed some familiar faces to flourish, Bobby Flay for one. Long after he’d finished Grillin’ and Chillin’, the network was still showing reruns of the forty-two episodes and using him in promotional materials, but his efforts to reach out to Food Network about making another show had failed. Calmly, Bobby had been applying pressure and gathering intelligence. Every time David Rosengarten, who had two series in production, In Food Today and Taste, stopped at Mesa Grill during 1995 and 1996, Bobby peppered him with questions about what was happening, who was running things, and what sorts of series they were looking for. “I’d really like to do more on the Food Network,” he confided to David.
Meanwhile, Bobby followed a second track. Through Joe Bastianich, the scion of a New York restaurant family, Bobby had become friends with a talent agent named Richie Jackson. Richie also knew Mario Batali and another young New York culinary star, Tom Colicchio, and like Shep, he had realized that, similar to the other celebrities he represented, chefs had the kind of big personalities and charisma that could lead to show business careers. They were stars. And few of them were represented by entertainment agents.
One night, Richie tried the idea on Bobby. “I would love to work with you and see what we could build.”
Bobby told Richie what he had told David Rosengarten: he was looking to get back into television. He liked being on camera, and it helped his restaurant business.
Richie said if the Food Network wasn’t calling back, it was time to look elsewhere. He knew people at Lifetime and, soon after that network’s executives met Bobby, they signed him to make a year’s worth of cooking shows called The Main Ingredient with Bobby Flay.
Lifetime paid for Bobby to visit Lou Ekus’s TV training facility. There Lou loosened Bobby up on camera. “Let me guess,” Lou said to Bobby on the first day of training. “You’re looking at the camera and you’re going to teach America to cook, right?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
Bobby was, as always, prepared to soak up useful information. He listened.
“Here’s the deal,” Lou continued, sizing up what might motivate Bobby. It wasn’t dogs. “Think of the girl that you never got. You have twenty-two minutes to seduce her with your food. Do it. You’re talking to her, only her. Pick up the fruits and vegetables and the meats and talk about them like they’re the greatest thing you’ve ever had in your hand. An onion? Why are you using it if it’s just any onion? You have to really explain it. Words like ‘great,’ ‘fantastic,’ and ‘delicious’ mean nothing. Talk about it. It’s a Spanish onion and it’s ‘picante.’ Seduce her.”
This Bobby could understand. Picante.
That trip and the experience of making more shows for Lifetime helped Bobby sharpen his TV skills. Having two popular restaurants kept him in the media. With their new budget and desire for big personalities, both Eileen and Heidi considered Bobby prime-time material, although Eileen did not think he had the goods to do it solo. He spoke too fast and he still seemed uneasy on-screen to her, but those deficiencies were outweighed by his compelling story as the New York boy who had become a success cooking Southwestern food, by his unflagging passion, and by his charisma. Eileen called Richie. Soon she signed Bobby for a new series, Hot Off the Grill.
She paired him with Jacqui Malouf, an edgy but chipper comedienne from Ontario. To differentiate it from a daytime cooking show, Eileen had Hot Off the Grill shot on a roomy set that featured an open living room in front of the kitchen. Cameras could pull back from the cooking area and catch an array of good-looking people arranged on couches and chairs nibbling what was coming from the kitchen. Jacqui was the cheerful host of this party, while Bobby cooked.
One of the first guests on H
ot Off the Grill was the comedian David Brenner. As Bobby dished out salmon tartare–stuffed piquillo peppers, Brenner told a story about the time his mother cooked liver so tough his frustrated father nailed it to the sole of his shoe with a hammer. “He sat all night with the liver hanging off of his shoe,” Brenner said, insisting it was a true story. “And all my mother said was, ‘There are other ways of expressing your dislike for my cooking.’”
Hot Off the Grill ran at 8:30 p.m. every weeknight as a lead-in to Emeril Live, at 9 p.m.
Heidi brought Bobby in to make new “Full of Flavor” on-air promotions. Bobby was shot in front of a green screen and when the promos were broadcast during commercial breaks throughout the day, viewers saw Bobby pointing at a giant, brilliantly yellow lemon that exploded when he touched it and formed the word juicy.
—
You could do anything with food, Eileen thought—travel shows, comedies set in a restaurant, documentaries. Like nearly every executive who had passed through Food Network, she agreed that Mario Batali was a star. He was cooking a creatively authentic version of Italian food few people had ever seen and explaining it with the flourish of a gifted storyteller. It was smart, but for some reason, Mario was attracting plenty of press but not many viewers, far fewer than Emeril and, still, not the female demographic the advertising department was selling. The ad men continued to pressure the programming department to let Mario go.
Mario had his defenders. Joe Allegro and Rich Gore of the events department argued for him to stay. On their tour, he was a big draw, a leading star, no matter what the ratings were saying. If the network wanted to continue to make profits from their road shows, they could not lose dependable talent. Mario had his own interest in staying on TV. First, he liked showing off what he knew. Second, in 1998, he and Joe Bastianich opened an ambitious restaurant in Greenwich Village called Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca, which won three stars from The New York Times—certainly good publicity, but so was a cooking show on a growing network.