by Allen Salkin
Rachael was asked to make a pilot. They paired her with a producer, Mark Dissin. Dissin—most everyone at the network called him by his last name—was a former sports documentary maker who had inherited the role that once belonged to Reese’s wife, Pat O’Gorman, the go-to in-house producer. Having worked with the revered Olympics storyteller Bud Greenspan, Dissin understood how to trim a production down to elements that would capture and hold a viewer, even a cooking show.
He and Rachael disagreed on the format of her show. She wanted to demonstrate three recipes for every featured ingredient, an approach with roots in both her demos at Cowan & Lobel, whose original intent had been to move a certain product, and her three-minute news spots.
He insisted that a show called 30 Minute Meals should present one meal cooked in thirty minutes without the shortcuts that would be required if three thirty-minute options were presented. He won.
—
Before shooting the pilot, Dissin gave Rachael one instruction: “Do not stop tape under any circumstance, period. It’s not your job. You keep going, no matter what.”
In the hallway before taping began, Rachael met Sara Moulton, who added another bit of advice: “Smile all the time for no apparent reason.”
Rachael’s nerves were not helped when she saw where they were taping her pilot: Emeril’s set. His name was projected onto the floor and it spun and stopped, spun and stopped: Emeril . . . Emeril . . . Emeril . . . Everything looked enormous to her. A radio bud was placed in her ear. Voices were speaking in it. They told her that they would instruct her when to look to camera one, two, three, four, or five, and when to wrap up for a commercial break.
She did not know which camera was which. “Can you call the camera people names instead of numbers? I’m confused. I don’t know what all the numbers are. I mean, I know that’s Jay.” She pointed to one of the cameramen. She’d met them all earlier. “Can we just call Jay, Jay? When you want me to look at Jay, just say, Jay!”
“Okay, you can call them by their names,” a voice said into her earpiece.
The kitchen staff had been prepping what they could for her, but there was not much they could do. Rachael had to pull all of the ingredients out of the on-set refrigerator, chop, measure, cook, and plate everything in thirty minutes. Someone in the backstage kitchen would be cooking along with her in case she burned or spilled something, but it was not like a traditional cooking show where, through “the magic of television,” the host would slide a chicken raw into the top of the oven and slide a duplicate out, fully roasted. Instead of trussing birds, pre-chopping onions, and measuring tablespoons of salt into little glass bowls, the only thing the kitchen staff did was preheat Rachael’s skillet. The light on the camera in front of her went on.
“Hey, everybody, I’m Rachael Ray and I make thirty-minute meals. Now that means in the time it takes you to watch this program, I will have made a delicious and healthy meal from start to finish.” That was the extent of the script that had been written for her. She had to ad-lib the rest of the banter.
During the discussion about what to call the cameras and through her introduction, a flame had been burning under her skillet.
“Now,” Rachael said, grabbing a bottle, “just gonna put a little bit of olive oil in the pan. Like one turn of the pan. About a tablespoon.”
She tilted the bottle. The instant the olive oil touched the skillet, which was now preheated to the point of combustion, FOOOOOM! A jet of flame shot four feet into the air.
WHOOOOSH!
Rachael jerked her head out of the way in time to avoid burning her eyebrows off.
She thought, I just set Emeril’s set on fire, and remembered Dissin telling her, “Don’t stop under any circumstance. We will tell you when to stop.”
Rachael smiled just like Sara had told her to, and threw salt on the burning oil, extinguishing the flame, and pushed the skillet off to the side. She grabbed another pan, a cold one, poured in a tablespoon of oil, and kept going.
—
Despite the conflagration, Rachael had been unfailingly chipper on camera. The network green-lit her show, ordering twenty-five episodes. As she shot her first season, Bobby, having grown into the role of shrewd big brother among the ever-shifting Food Network family, was asked to go watch her and offer whatever advice he could. He stood in the wings for twenty minutes. Her own set was a mélange of oranges, saturated teals, and canary yellows. The toaster was bulbous like a child’s toy. Even the microwave oven with a little circular window managed to be cute. It was all irrepressibly bright and bouncy.
Bobby did what Bobby does: made a snap judgment that turned out to be right. He focused on the star. She just gets it, he thought. She’s just who she is. She doesn’t make any false moves. You can tell she’s going to be good.
Between episodes, he introduced himself. Rachael was still overwhelmed by her success—from local news to Food Network in a matter of months. “Bobby Flay is coming to see me?” she said to him as he approached her.
“You’re not trying to be anybody else,” he praised her. “People will relate to you immediately.”
As she continued shooting episodes in the summer of 2001, Rachael developed a tension-loosening ritual called Dollar Fridays. Everyone on the crew—twenty or thirty people at that point, including camerapeople, culinary producers, back kitchen staff, the director, the set dresser, hair, and makeup—would write his or her name on a dollar bill and put it in a bin. Before the lunch break, Rachael would pull out one bill and read the winning name. The winner had $20 or $30 to buy a nice lunch.
Despite her efforts to spread charm, not everyone at the network was a fan. Many of the kitchen staff were miffed that someone with less expertise than they had was giving cooking advice in front of the camera. If Bobby was the brother figure in the Food Network family, Emeril was still the patriarch, the Godfather. Judy regularly asked his opinion about new talent. “She doesn’t know anything about food,” Emeril griped. “I would not put her on. She dilutes what Food Network is all about.”
But to Judy, Food Network was about good television, not evangelical proselytizing about the wonders of food culture and how to avoid lumps in your béchamel. Her approach would soon bear fruit, but not in a way she or anyone else would have wanted. Nevertheless, it must be said, as dreadful as it sounds: From a profit perspective, the best thing to ever happen to Food Network was September 11, 2001.
—
The national catastrophe created opportunities for men like Barry and Jon, and vindicated Judy’s approach, opening space for a wide range of TV-friendly talent, some with only filament-thin tethers to the world of fine food. But the client who had brought Jon Rosen and William Morris into the network would not benefit.
Ming Tsai’s latest show, Ming’s Quest, took him on the road internationally, cooking in exotic locations. After a long day of shooting that Tuesday, he and his crew were unwinding at the bar of the Four Seasons hotel in Bali. It was just after 9 p.m., twelve hours ahead of New York. The general manager of the hotel came up to the group and announced, “There’s been a horrible accident. A plane hit World Trade Center One.”
There was no more information. A member of Ming’s crew was a little freaked out because his sister lived close to the tower. But what could they do? They were on the other side of the earth. It sounded like a terrible accident. They kept drinking.
Twenty-two minutes later, the GM came over again. “You need to get to a TV. A second building was hit.” The crew walked to the hotel’s TV room. Two Americans were crying. The news showed a tower collapsing and a massive cloud of dust.
“What movie is this?” Ming asked.
They caught the first flight to Taiwan, where they began a long wait for a flight home.
—
Within forty minutes of the second plane hitting, Ken Lowe, Ed Spray, the president of Scripps’s cable television d
ivision, and Frank Gardner, the board chairman, held a conference call with Judy and the presidents of Scripps’s two other networks, HGTV and DIY, to talk over what the networks should do. Should they continue with their scheduled programming? Wouldn’t any commercial seem grotesque in the horror of the attack—even an ad for a laundry detergent’s power to remove stains would seem inappropriate. What sort of stains? Bloodstains? Should they break in and make public service announcements? What other options were there?
Every non-news station faced similar choices. ESPN switched to a feed from ABC News. MTV carried CBS News. The Home Shopping Network showed Canadian network news, and TLC picked up the BBC World Service. The History Channel, Comedy Central, Travel, SciFi, E!, and Lifetime stuck with regular programming even if some resorted to reruns.
At Scripps, Gardner, who had worked in television news, said, “We have to do something drastic. Let’s just go to a slide with music.”
For twenty-four hours, Food pulled everything. Over gentle music, a single slide was shown with a purple lily and the text “Due to the nature of today’s tragic events, the Food Network is suspending programming.”
The studio had been preparing for a three-week shoot of Emeril Live when all production was canceled. The Food Network kitchen staff cooked all the food they had stocked for the shoot and donated it to St. Luke’s Hospital.
Early viewer reaction was positive. Judging by e-mails and calls, viewers felt it was appropriate to pull the programming. Who could stomach anything except news during those first few hours? But within twelve hours, after nothing else had blown up, people’s brains were beaten senseless from watching loops of the planes, the towers’ collapse, terrified workers running for their lives through ash clouds in downtown Manhattan, the smoldering Pentagon, and aircraft wreckage in rural Pennsylvania. By the first night, a trickle of viewers was asking to see people cooking on television. Devoted fans wanted to retreat to the hearth, even if the hearth was a television showing a hearth.
After one day of darkness, Scripps decided that its programming, safe and nonviolent, generally focused on home and family, would offer a needed distraction. In the days that followed, news stories reported that couples who had broken up before the trauma of 9/11 had decided to get married. Soup kitchens saw an influx of volunteers. There was talk everywhere of “cocooning” with one’s family. It was clear to Judy and her team what they had to do. TV audiences wanted TV that nurtures. Food Network could become an oasis; the network would air as much television comfort food as possible.
Ming, marooned in Taiwan for four days, caught a flight to Toronto, and hired a car to drive him thirteen hours home to Boston. A new season of East Meets West was scheduled to begin shooting the next week in New York. His wife told him he wasn’t going—the towers were still smoldering.
The pause in production gave the network time to reconsider. It had many seasons of East Meets West in the can. Now that they were no longer putting straight instructional cooking on in prime time, Eileen figured they could rerun what episodes they had more frequently in daytime, especially since the Asian ingredients Ming was using were still esoteric to most viewers. As Eileen saw it, most people who owned woks had been given them as wedding gifts, stored them in a closet for a few years, and then tried to off-load them at yard sales. If Ming had convinced viewers to oil them up even once, that would have been a lot. A little East Meets West went a long way. Meanwhile, Ming’s Quest, part of the effort to try talent outside the studio, had been getting middling ratings in prime time, nowhere near those of Good Eats.
Ming had worked hard to get on the network and spent thousands of dollars of his own money for media training. But it had served him. His restaurant in Wellesley was a success and he would soon land a deal to make a show called Simply Ming on public television. Food Network had helped turn him into a star, Jon had helped monetize it, and Ming had no intention of relinquishing the status.
—
Barry Weiner saw 9/11 not as a problem for Paula, but as an opportunity.
His office was near the Carnegie Deli, the landmark Theater District restaurant famous for its gigantic sandwiches: piles of pastrami and corned beef so rich they threatened to send most diners into a food coma. Many a tourist has been forced to cancel afternoon plans in favor of a nap after a battle with a Carnegie Deli sandwich. In the weeks after the tragedy, Barry noticed two things around Midtown. First, there seemed to be a funeral every two hours at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Second, there was a constant line of 150 people waiting to get into the Carnegie Deli. The city’s fine-dining establishments were suffering, as were many other businesses in the city, but not the Carnegie.
He made an appointment to see Judy. She had grown weary of him pitching Paula, but she respected Barry’s TV acumen.
“Judy,” he said. “Do me a favor. Walk home from work.” She and Barry happened to live in the same apartment building on West Fifty-seventh street. “I want you to walk along Seventh Avenue. And when you walk along Seventh Avenue, take a look at the Carnegie Deli. The only thing that might be a little unhealthier than fried chicken is corned beef and pastrami. I am willing to bet you that there will be at least ten times as many people outside waiting in line at the Carnegie Deli as there are in any of those so-called fancy restaurants that you believe your audience wants.”
Judy laughed at him.
He called her the next day. “Well?”
She had seen the line.
“You know something,” Barry said, pressing his case, “one thing that we’ve all learned because of 9/11 is we’re all going to die. We know that. Whether we eat corned beef, or we don’t eat corned beef, or whether we eat fried chicken, or we don’t eat fried chicken, or whether we eat macaroni and cheese or we don’t, it’s not going to make a difference. But the fact is, you want to know something? We’re in a world right now where you see a funeral every three hours, you want to feel good. They’re not locals outside the Carnegie. Those are tourists from the Midwest. All of those people who you believe aren’t going to want these sorts of things are standing outside because they want to eat a three-pound corned beef sandwich, and they’re also going to watch Paula Deen on your network.”
Judy sighed. “Okay, come and talk to me.”
She relented enough to approve paying for two pilots for Paula, closely overseen by network staff.
—
Eric Ober, the deposed network president, watched the Emeril sitcom when it debuted on September 25. He cringed. One crucial mistake was obvious immediately: Emeril had been cast with taller performers. On his cooking shows, Emeril prowled his kitchen station with commanding intensity. On NBC, dwarfed by Urich, he looked dumpy and out of it. Emeril’s awful in this format, Eric thought, and it’s not going to work. He believed that Jim, in the quest to earn his commission on a fat network TV contract, had put his client into a position he should not have been in.
Critics brought out their knives again. Neil Genzlinger in The New York Times called the show “a hacking, sputtering mess.”
Viewers agreed. Ratings declined nearly every week.
Zucker invited Emeril to his office. “It’s nothing wrong with the show, nothing wrong with the cast,” he told the chef. “We’ve got some really great people. But I can’t do another season of it. The numbers are not there, and I’ve got to answer to the board.”
Emeril the sitcom was off the air before November.
Emeril did not like to see any venture bearing his name fail, but he still had Emeril Live, Essence of Emeril, restaurants, new cookbooks on the horizon, and a growing line of pots and pans called Emerilware.
Emeril’s ultimate judgment about the sitcom was the same as his appraisal of other important business endeavors in his life: It was about the relationships. Everyone had tried their hardest. To his mind, no one had betrayed him. Even when he agreed to try a cockamamie show like How to Boil Water, he had met
people he liked, put his trust in them, and found things to enjoy about the experience. One had led to great things, the other had not.
“It was awesome,” he remembered of the sitcom cast and producers, “having a relationship with Robert Urich, Sherri Shepherd, Lisa Ann Walter, Jeff Zucker, Harry and Linda.” Emeril did not blame Jim. He chalked the failure up to debuting so soon after 9/11. “Not a good day for comedy,” he said.
Jim also interpreted the quick cancellation not as a verdict on Emeril as a star, but as a result of the changing appetite of viewers after 9/11. To this day, he does not allow that it might have been partially his fault for allowing his client to get involved with it in the first place.
—
While Judy had denigrated the concept of the network as a cooking school, she understood that there was still a place for instruction, as long as it wasn’t in prime time and the hosts were telegenic. She and Eileen created a programming block for Saturday mornings that the network advertised as “Cooking School.” The eight half-hour shows started being rolled out around the network’s eighth anniversary in November 2001. In its first iteration, the block included mostly existing shows, but it also had three new titles. In order, the schedule was: Molto Mario; Cooking Thin (a new show starring Kathleen Daelemans); Sara’s Secrets, a recorded show Sara Moulton was making in place of Cooking Live; 30 Minute Meals with Rachael Ray; From Martha’s Kitchen; Sweet Dreams, a dessert cooking show starring Chicago pastry chef Gale Gand; Wolfgang Puck; and Melting Pot.
Rachael’s show was quickly a standout. She was delivering a message for people who were disconnected from their kitchens, and in the wake of 9/11 yearned to find a way back. She told them it was not so difficult to cook—if she could, they could. In thirty minutes, anyone, even a working mom, even someone who didn’t know an amuse-bouche from an amusement park, could pull off a little miracle that would allow her to spend “quality time” with people she cared about.