by Allen Salkin
Emeril Live ran at 8 p.m. every weeknight, followed at 9 p.m. by a variety of shows, including Door Knock Dinners on Mondays, Good Eats on Wednesdays, and Food 911 on Thursdays. They would in turn be followed by The Best Of, FoodNation—the road show following Bobby Flay around the country—and It’s a Surprise!, in which Marc Summers, Sissy’s old partner, would travel around the country helping regular people throw surprise parties.
She put Hot Off the Grill, Ming Tsai’s East Meets West, and Molto Mario in late-afternoon/early-evening slots known as “Early Fringe,” with From Martha’s Kitchen—cooking segments strung together from the purchased Martha Stewart shows. She populated the morning with straightforward cooking shows that cost the network almost nothing: Julia Child, The Galloping Gourmet, and archived episodes of Sara’s Cooking Live and Curtis’s Pick of the Day. Overnight hours generally featured long infomercials that allowed advertising salesmen to collect the kind of commissions that create loyalty and the network to extract revenue from thinly watched periods.
Since Eric Ober’s departure, Matt had grown increasingly uneasy with the direction of the network. Eileen, his ally and protector, was trying to align herself with Judy’s vision, but he had a harder time.
He was astonished at the bland ideas he was seeing. Whenever he was in a meeting where Judy was discussing potential new series, he had a hard time holding his tongue. “Does this really look like a good thing to you?” Matt would ask. He came to meetings armed with his usual quiver of unusual ideas, but not one hit the mark. He pitched a strange Japanese animated cooking show called Mister Ajikko.
No go, he was told.
After MTV did a “Wanna Be a VJ” contest, Matt wrote a production budget and a pitch for a show in which people who dreamed of hosting their own cooking shows could compete for a chance to do one on Food Network.
It was a nonstarter.
Judy knew that Matt had done a lot for the network. If she could bring his talents into line, tame him just enough, he could remain useful. She told Matt that he had a good nose for new shows and was gifted at honing ideas. She met with him one-on-one and told him, “We appreciate how much you’ve done for this network, but you have to understand that the network is headed on a slightly different tack. You need to get on board with the direction this network’s programming is going in.”
Matt told her he understood. He would try to mutter less at meetings and not criticize other people’s ideas so much.
Judy summed up her message in terms she thought Matt would understand: “You need to be less creative.”
One day in the new main conference room, Judy showed Matt and Eileen a tape that had come to her attention of a woman who was appearing on segments of local news in Albany, New York. The woman, a cheerful native of upstate New York named Rachael Ray, was demonstrating how home cooks could make quick meals for their families.
“Do you like her?” Judy asked.
Matt did not think Rachael was terrible, but she was not groundbreaking television like Iron Chef or Alton Brown. She was pleasant. There are so many good people we should put on before we put on Rachael Ray! he thought.
“See if you can find a place for her,” Judy said.
Heidi had been making plans to leave since Eric had left, and she finally did in May 2000. Her farewell e-mail to her comrades praised the network and concluded, with sass, “Can’t help but leave with a few ‘Heidi-isms.’ These thoughts have guided me throughout my endeavors, and perhaps they’ll guide/inspire you, too . . .” Characteristically, these included:
Wear black to the office. Wear leather to big meetings. Don’t answer to “honey.” Always accept cashmere. Use perfume as a weapon.
They make an interesting contrast with the “core values” of the cable division of Scripps: “Diversity, clarity in communication, integrity, compassion/support, shared responsibility, work/life balance, openness, and humor.”
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Judy’s management style may have lacked ideal measures of Scrippsian compassion and humor, but she certainly was clear and open about what she wanted: broader appeal. As the old shows and established personalities were ushered out, Judy began reshaping the network. In Heidi’s place, Judy hired Adam Rockmore, a marketing expert who had been working for the chocolate giant Godiva. Adam gravitated to a show the network had begun developing for Marc Summers to host called Unwrapped, in which the ever-chipper host traveled the country explaining the origins of popular food products. Eileen had been pushing hard to do more productions outside the studios, and the increased programming budgets were allowing it. A show already being shot on the road was Food Finds, focusing on obscure delicacies.
“I want to get behind Unwrapped,” Adam told Judy soon after he arrived.
“Why?” she asked. “Food Finds is similar. Why wouldn’t we just continue to invest in that show, versus a new show?”
“Food Finds,” he replied, “is pretzels from Amish country.” If you asked consumers which show they’d want, the answer would be clear. “You can learn about Twinkies and about Junior Mints, or you can learn about pretzels from Amish country?” Judy loved the logic. Unwrapped wasn’t about food. It was about nostalgia and pop culture, and Marc, fondly remembered for Double Dare, was a perfect pop nostalgia fit for it.
Eileen delivered a British show called The Naked Chef, starring a young chef named Jamie Oliver. He had come to fame when he happened to be working the risotto station at the trendy River Café restaurant in London the day a TV crew came to make a documentary about the Christmas season. In his early twenties, Jamie was funny and had the kind of blond tousled hair and cheerful, rumpled features that gave him the general air of being comfortably in his pajamas no matter what he was actually wearing. To complete the picture of a carefree hipster chef, a category that had rarely if ever been presented before in the mainstream media, Jamie played the drums in a band called Scarlet Division.
After the documentary, Jamie received calls from a number of production companies interested in developing a food show with him. At first, he thought his friends were playing a joke, and cursed out one caller. He decided to go with Optomen, the company that had produced Two Fat Ladies.
Patricia Llewellyn, the producer who had given Two Fat Ladies its name, suggested to Jamie that he call his show The Naked Chef. It would grab attention and convey the basic message of the show: don’t get too fancy, use good basic ingredients and don’t muss them up with sauces and difficult preparations.
First broadcast in April 1999 on BBC2, The Naked Chef introduced a heartthrob young chef with a working-class accent tooling around town on a scooter, charming his hot girlfriend with a chocolate tart, whipping up Thai Green Curry Chicken for his band, and baking focaccia with rosemary and garlic for his sister’s “hen night.” The same year Naked Chef debuted in England, hearts were aflutter over the star of another new show, Nigella Bites, on BBC 4. The daughter of a prominent politician, Nigella Lawson was a voluptuous beauty with thick brunette hair, massive brown eyes, and a seductive way of saying butter, sauté, and luscious. An American journalist wrote that Nigella cooked dinner like it was “a prelude to an orgy.”
When Nigella’s British production company shopped American rights, Food did not bid. Tempted though Judy was, her willingness to dollop British talent into the schedule only went so far. Nigella Bites was snapped up by the Style Network in the States.
In the meantime, Food set about making the most of Jamie, and Adam hired an outside advertising agency, G Whiz. The first thing everyone asked when they heard the name of the show was, “Is he really naked?” so the ad men decided to work with that misconception. A nationwide advertising campaign that was unfurled in the fall of 2000 played with the idea that something naked was coming to Food Network. Bus shelters and billboards, some in Times Square, 240 in Los Angeles alone, showed posters of fruit and proclaimed, “Naked Chef Coming to Food Network.” One dis
played two cantaloupes that looked like breasts. The second showed a peach, photographed in soft-focus so it looked not unlike a naked derriere, delicate fuzz on pinkish lobes. The third showed a rigid half-peeled banana.
Incensed residents of a Philadelphia suburb considered the suggestive cantaloupes, bananas, and peaches too risqué for children, and called their cable company, demanding that they take down the fruit ads.
Word of the uproar reached the chairman of the Scripps board, who called Ken. He remembered, “The chairman of our company saw it before I did. So I got a phone call. He was not pleased.” When Ken saw the ads for the first time, he thought they were not Scripps material. What were those insane people in New York doing?
He called Judy and cautioned her, “You can go right to the edge, but don’t go over the edge. This is a Midwestern, family-controlled company.”
“Okay,” she apologized, “so I went over the edge on this one.” She pulled a full-page ad that had been set to run in USA Today.
Ken mollified the Scripps board. “You have to understand,” he told them. “Food is always going to have a better sense of humor than our other networks. If you attach a personality to HGTV and a personality to Food, Food’s the one you’re always going to invite. And here’s the reason. Remodeling, building, this is serious stuff, okay? You screw up a bathroom remodel? It’s thirty grand. You mess up an omelette? I’ll make it again. So this will be a little edgy. This will be more fun. We’ll try different things with this.”
As much as dedicated viewers bemoaned the loss of food experts like David, there was something exciting about the new versions of a foodcentric life Jamie and others were presenting. Jamie with his curries was not the food world equivalent of Bob Dylan in his brilliance, but both performers opened up what a star could be in their respective fields. Dylan self-consciously (and with the help of a manager) created the poet rock star. Jamie, partly by chance, partly by natural temperament, partly thanks to Patricia Llewellyn, was the prototype hipster-chef. Of course, there had been earlier models—Chef Marco Pierre White, for instance—but none so famous. Jamie opened up the field to new formulations of what a chef might be, and, more broadly, what a foodie’s lifestyle could entail. The fruit campaign, despite the protest, worked. People magazine named Jamie one of the sexiest men alive and photographed him in a bathtub deep in bubbles, surrounded by grapes. The article reported that he had actually cooked once wearing nothing but an apron. “Not a good idea,” Jamie was quoted as saying. “The steam from the convection oven got through and burnt me old fella.” At a Food Network party to welcome him to New York, Jamie, clad in a blue corduroy suit, joked about his inability to keep his mouth shut and laughed about the time he was being interviewed and confessed to once eating “codfish semen.”
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The network was stretching the definition of food programming, but only to a point. There were aspects of the chef’s life Food was not showing: the occasional bacchanalia, the long, hot-tempered hours in the kitchen, and the burnout. Ken had said Food was always going to be edgier than HGTV. He had seen for himself through ouzo goggles that the chef’s life was not only about properly seared steak. The people drawn to the restaurant life are often more adventurous and passionate than your typical air-conditioner installer. It attracts adrenaline junkies.
This image of the life was rising in pop culture. In 2000, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, a tell-all book about the sex, drugs, and seamy side of the business, became a best seller. It cast the life of a line cook in an appealingly gritty light and made a bad-boy star of the author, Anthony Bourdain. Meanwhile, Richard Gere handsomely played a chef in the movie Autumn in New York, and even a commercial for Viagra starred a knowingly smiling restaurateur cooking with fire while his wife extolled his virtues.
Tyler Florence was one of those starting to live the more devilish life available to a chef freed from the kitchen. One incident demonstrated that his own appetites were leading him to ignore some of the advice Bobby had given him in Las Vegas—to remain humble and contained when it came to his dealings with the Food Network. In December 2000, the network sent a hired car to pick Tyler up at his one-bedroom apartment on Chrystie Street. He was due at a studio for a publicity photo shoot.
Susie Fogelson was assigned to oversee the photo shoot with Tyler. She was a brand-new public relations department staffer with auburn curls and a trim figure, who had just been persuaded to leave Nickelodeon, where she’d promoted SpongeBob SquarePants, by the promise of working with flesh-and-blood TV stars at a network that was still young and rough enough to offer the promise of quick advancement. The network needed shots of Tyler to use for advertisements and other marketing. It was simple, but the only substantial shoot Susie had seen before was for Rugrats, a show about the adventures of rambunctious toddlers. Chefs are more mischievous. Tyler was drinking wine, and his teeth were stained red, but instead of telling him about it so he could drink water or brush his teeth, Susie just dreamily stared at him.
Oh, we can fix it in Photoshop, she thought, looking at his brown eyes.
When the shoot was done, Tyler, picking up on her attraction, gave Susie a kiss on the lips that was slightly too long for an appropriate work kiss, and asked if she wanted to come out that night with him and some friends.
Serious about her work, Susie declined.
“Oh, well, is it okay if I keep the car for a while?”
“Um, okay,” the starstruck new hire answered. She wanted to give him what he wanted where possible. But the car had been intended only to pick Tyler up for the shoot and take him right home, a few hours max, a total cost of $150 or $200.
Tyler kept the car and driver all night. The tab came in near $1,200.
Susie quietly submitted the expense and vowed to be more careful around chefs in the future.
As the status of chefs rose, eager producers rushed into the food TV business with every kind of show idea. Matt was still working as Eileen’s assistant, screening pilot tapes. One day a tape came in embossed with a fancy label—Suzanne DeLaurentiis Productions. She was pitching a food show called La Cocina de las Estrellas (The Kitchen of the Stars) featuring Charo and Ed McMahon. Charo was the bubbly Spanish performer known for giggling “cuchi-cuchi!” during guest stints on the 1970s show The Love Boat. Ed McMahon was Johnny Carson’s straight-man sidekick on The Tonight Show with a well-known affection for alcohol. The Kitchen of the Stars had been shot in a few hours at a small studio in an industrial stretch of North Hollywood. When McMahon showed up for the 8 a.m. call, he told the director, a hastily hired television arts teacher at Pasadena City College named Brent Keast, “I have a golf date. You have to finish this thing by eleven.”
Matt was impressed by the label. De Laurentiis is a famous name in the movie business: Dino De Laurentiis was a legendary movie producer, though Suzanne was, at best, a distant relation (his granddaughter Giada, three years away from being a cooking star herself, was working as a caterer in Hollywood at the time).
Matt slipped the tape into a video player. On-screen, Chef Claud Beltran, a Los Angeles caterer, prepared spicy dishes. Next to him, Charo and McMahon hammed it up in the blindingly bright kitchen, sticking spoons in dishes and trying to be funny. For some reason, Frankie Avalon, the singer and actor known for his early 1960s beach movies, came on the set, too. Chef Beltran attempted to explain everything he did in English and Spanish. Ed said little more than “Oh,” “Yes,” and “Looks good,” and held up a copy of his recently published autobiography, For Laughing Out Loud: My Life and Good Times.
Charo shimmied. “Oh!”
The Kitchen of the Stars was execrable.
Matt took the tape to Eileen. “You have to see this,” he said. They laughed hysterically at the show and agreed that it may have been the worst pilot they had ever seen.
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Ken had instructed Judy to think of Food Networ
k not only as a cable channel, but as a brand. The founders of the network had seen the possibilities, but no one had chased them as hard as Ken now wanted to. Think Food Network–branded utensils, he told Judy, selling shows internationally, cookbooks, and more. Judy was not an expert at this kind of brand extending, but she understood Ken wanted shows elemental enough to cross borders and talent that could be trusted in front of advertisers.
Eileen was trying to fall into line with the new leadership, but Matt’s tastes had not changed. He continued to suggest the kind of unusual ideas he always had. He wrote a pitch for a series on molecular gastronomy and presented it at a programming meeting. He argued that a science-focused cooking program on what was happening at a molecular level would be cool.
“Interesting,” one executive said. “Are people really interested in science when they are here for food?”
“Well, they like it on Good Eats,” Matt parried.
“That has Alton.”
He wanted the network to do documentaries on food and social issues. He pitched an idea similar to Behind the Music called The 100 People Who Changed the Way the World Eats. It would feature a countdown where historians would discuss everyone from Christopher Columbus to Count Rumford, the pioneer of the temperature-control stove. Matt did financial projections for a book and a DVD box set.
He suggested a show similar to Dave Attell’s Insomniac, in which a comedian would tour late-night drinking and eating haunts.
“Not our demographic, Matt,” Eileen said.
Back when Eric had called him “the golden boy of Food Network,” the network president also told him that if he played his cards right, he might one day run the network. Now, making $67,000 a year, Matt was not interested in playing things right. Under Judy, it wasn’t working.
Matt began using a company credit card to pay for lunches and dinners with oddball production companies. He thought they would lead him to his next killer idea, the one that would bring him back to the center of the network’s creative attention. Not authorized to incur expenses by meeting with representatives of companies Eileen had not approved in advance, he hid his tracks and did not document these meetings in proper expense reports.