by Allen Salkin
During the SOBE festival in 2009, Carrie and Robert sat down to talk. “I would never want to do that again,” she said. “I was so mad at you, and I wanted you gone. But I would never want to do that to somebody ever again.”
Robert said he forgave her.
It appeared the network and its stars could get away with nearly anything (short of putting out a contract on a spouse) as long as the hit shows kept coming.
A Ten-Billion-Dollar Prize
In mid-2000, Scripps had announced a new cable channel called Fine Living Network. Susan Packard, president of Scripps’s New Ventures division told the A.P. that it would focus on luxury programming. If Fine Living were a magazine, it would be like The Robb Report and Town & Country, not Good Housekeeping. “Never has there been a moment in history,” Susan explained, “where we have seen so much disposable income and yet so little disposable time.”
Scripps had agreements from Time Warner, DirecTV, and a national co-op of small cable providers to put the new channel into around twenty million homes, but the timing could hardly have been worse. Yet neither the stock market plunge in the fall of 2000 nor the horror of 9/11 were enough to derail Fine Living’s debut in 2002. Where Food Network had profited from the cocooning instinct triggered by 9/11, Fine Living’s prospects plummeted. Shows like Collector Car Auction and Bulging Brides (a weight-loss challenge) did not win an audience. By the recession of 2009, Fine Living was the only Scripps Network Interactive channel showing a loss, with revenue falling 6.7 percent in the first quarter and twenty-three percent in the second, when its revenue was a paltry $11 million.
SNI executives remained bullish on Food, whose prime-time audience had jumped 15 percent in the last quarter of 2008 compared to the previous year and gotten younger. The median age of viewers fell from forty-seven years old to forty-four—good news for advertisers. SNI tried to buy out Tribune’s stake, an effort that was stymied when Tribune entered court-supervised bankruptcy.
In June 2009, Ken Lowe and his team at SNI started to work out a deal to buy Travel Channel, hoping to add it to their food and shelter lifestyle channels. But they were simultaneously trying to figure how to bail on Fine Living. It was in fifty-five million homes in 2009 and Scripps did not want to give up the distribution deals with cable and satellite providers they had fought to win. Better to switch the channel’s identity and keep the slot on the cable dial.
What identity? With the Travel Channel deal pending, that subject was not an option. Nor was another shopping channel. The company had lost millions on ShopAtHome and closed it in 2006, leading Judy Girard to try running one more network, HGTV, before she finally retired from television. HGTV itself already had a home-improvement spin-off in DIY, so home improvement was not an option to replace Fine Living. Dating back to Ken’s original plan, SNI was in the business of lifestyle networks. It wasn’t going to start the Scripps News Channel. Meanwhile, Gusto had been abandoned, but rumors were rampant that Fox and Discovery were eyeing the rising Food Network profits and plotting rival food channels.
Everything pointed to doing more with food, the proven winner. Ken, John Lansing (SNI’s vice president), Brooke, and others at Food Network began discussing what kind of channel they could spin off that would not simply mimic the existing one. Where was the space to do something else?
The answer, they felt, was in the cooking shows Food had moved away from. The executives had heard the complaints about its abandonment of foodie culture and of instructional series in prime time. A channel based on them might not attract Food’s high ratings, but its initial goal simply would be to improve upon the measly Fine Living. They went through a few possible names—Foodie, Dish, Eats, and Spice—before settling on the more generic Cooking Channel. In October 2009, Scripps announced that Fine Living would become Cooking Channel the next year.
When Food was founded in 1993, the first president’s wife said it was one of the worst ideas she’d ever heard. Now it was serious business, the center of a corporate machine, beloved, sometimes reviled—always cared about—by millions of people. But it had never been here before, heading toward its seventeenth birthday and about to reproduce.
It was one thing to make the broad-stroke decision to launch a cooking channel that was different from Food Network, but it was another to drill down to exactly what ought to be on that channel. In May 2010, Food Network was a top-ten cable network averaging 707,000 viewers throughout the day and 1.13 million in prime time, but it had taken four years to come up with its first defining breakthrough, Emeril Live.
In some ways it was far easier for Scripps to start a new food channel in 2010 than it had been for ProJo in 1993. No one needed to prove that there could be a viable 24-hour-a-day network devoted to food programming. Plus, distribution was a less desperate affair this time, simply a matter of convincing affiliates not to do anything for the time being and to give the spin-off a chance. The name would change from Fine Living to Cooking Channel one night at midnight; if ratings improved without cannibalizing ratings from Food, it would bring in more advertising dollars to cable providers and give subscribers a new channel they liked. Win-win . . . well, almost. Scripps did end up spending about $40 million in “launch incentives” to cajole carriers to make the switch. This was a drag on Cooking Channel’s bottom line, as was, from Scripps’s perspective, the fact that under its agreements with Tribune, Cooking had to become part of the Food Network partnership. This meant the Chicago company received roughly 30 percent of Cooking, too. Overall, though, these were still small hurdles compared to what TVFN had to overcome at its launch.
And yet, in other ways, Cooking Channel had challenges similar to those TVFN had faced in 1993. New programming was needed, fast. The channel had originally been planned to start in the fall of 2010, but it had become apparent that the launch would go better if it fit with the annual schedule of advertising sales in the spring. More important, Scripps executives wanted to make sure they scooped Discovery or Fox. As Reese had done in 1993, Scripps wanted to scare everyone else away. The start date for Cooking Channel was moved up three months, to the end of May.
It was also a challenge to Food Network itself. Part of the reason to start the new channel was to protect Food from a rival start-up, but even under a Scripps banner, this would be Food’s first 24-hour competition. Would the spin-off harm its big brother by sapping resources, or show it up by being more in tune with foodie culture?
One way to ensure that the older brother stayed in charge was to keep the sibling close. Ken Lowe and John Lansing had floated the idea of creating the infrastructure of a completely separate network. What better way to assure that the new network had a separate voice from Food than to give it a separate staff? Perhaps it should be headquartered in Knoxville—the city had better food available than when Susan Stockton had scouted it more than a decade earlier. Or maybe Brooklyn?
Brooke Johnson resisted. She did not want to create a rival within Scripps that would potentially compete with her network for show ideas, talent, and budget, and she argued that it would be better to leverage the executive, marketing, and production talent in the 100,000 square feet of Chelsea Market occupied by Food. This is what they’d done at A&E when they launched History within the womb of the mother ship. It would certainly be cheaper to run the new network out of Food’s Manhattan headquarters.
She got what she wanted, but the victory led to another question: whether Food Network, having evolved to deliver an ever more commercially successful product for a broad market, could now simultaneously produce an edgier product for a narrower audience. Would there be any courage to stick with riskier programming if it did not produce spectacular results from the outset, especially since everyone in the building knew what would likely work to build ratings fast—more Giada, more Paula, more Rachael?
Michael Smith, appointed from within the executive ranks of Food Network to become general manager of the Cooking Channel
, said the right things in an interview for The New York Times before the network debut. It might provide space for riskier fare than Food Network, he said; for example, critical documentaries like Food, Inc. and Super Size Me, and shows about authentic ethnic restaurants where viewers could be shown live chickens killed before cooking.
But revealing his more conservative instincts as a Berkeley MBA, Michael also suggested that Cooking Channel would be smart to mirror some of Food’s offerings. If Food Network had had a sister channel a few years earlier, when Cake Boss was being pitched, the fact that Food already had Ace of Cakes would not have militated against a second cake show. Cake Boss could have gone to Cooking Channel, establishing its bug-eyed star Buddy Valastro and his bickering but loving family as Scripps property, thereby keeping TLC from grabbing a thick wedge of the food television pie.
Bruce Seidel was appointed head of programming for Cooking, but he reported to Bob Tuschman, head of programming at Food, and still was expected to continue to come up with ideas there. It was an unclear role, reflecting Food’s trepidation about letting Cooking Channel find its own voice.
Indeed, some of the hours of programming were filled from Food Network’s archive. Like Food, Cooking Channel would start with a daily helping of Julia Child and Galloping Gourmet “classics.” Fine Living was already running episodes of the original Japanese Iron Chef to fill out its nightly schedule and Two Fat Ladies was wheeled out for Cooking Channel’s prime time as well.
This choice of shows, drawn from Food Network’s less orthodox programming developed in the days of Joe Langhan and Matt Stillman, showed that Cooking Channel promised to be a departure from the middle-of-the-road programming Food Network had come to rely on as it chased—and caught—an ever-wider audience. Cooking Channel also acquired the U.S. broadcast rights to foreign series such as Food Jammers, a Canadian show about three artsy young men who invented outlandish kitchen gadgets, and Chinese Food Made Easy, a five-year-old import from Great Britain’s UKTV Food starring Ching-He Huang.
“Stay Hungry” was the new network’s slogan. But hungry for what exactly?
—
From the outset, Brooke, wanting Cooking Channel to be a quick success and prove the wisdom of her approach, could not help but tap some of Food’s tried-and-true talent. For instance, Bobby had been pitching a brunch cooking show for five years. “I’m probably one of the only professional chefs who likes to cook brunch and takes it very seriously,” he argued. “I do it in my restaurants very seriously, and on Saturday and Sunday mornings, when you’re watching cooking shows, that’s what you should be eating. Not roasted chicken.”
But in meeting after meeting, he’d been told, “Brunch is too narrow.” The rejection annoyed him. The programming department’s protests sounded ridiculous. How many times had he proven himself? But Bobby, the old playground point guard, might be the least neurotic person who ever lived. He had literally become a professional gambler, investing in race horses (mostly fillies); eventually he would be elected a Breeders Cup trustee and write commentary for Thoroughbred Daily News. When Brooke asked, “Can you do us a favor, and do a show on the Cooking Channel?” he was ready. Always on point, never shaken, justice would be his.
“Sure,” Bobby said, “but it’s got to be brunch.”
—
Brunch at Bobby’s featured the star in a rented house in the Hamptons preparing waffles and the like. Bobby and his third wife, actress Stephanie March, were having their own country house built on the East End of Long Island the summer the show was first shot in 2010. Brunch would be ready for Cooking Channel’s first fall. “Casual Bobby at home,” Kim Williamson of the programming department explained at a planning meeting. “Rumpled T-shirt, the whole nine.”
Two other now-totemic Food Network stars were cast in new productions for Cooking Channel. Rachael Ray made Week in a Day, a show shot on the 30 Minute Meals set in which she would cook many meals in one go; and, back after three years away, Emeril Lagasse appeared in a small-budget six-episode run of Fresh Food Fast that did not exactly stretch the iconic chef—in one episode he made Kicked-up Tuna Melts (anchovy paste and Brie took it up a notch)—but it did show that the network continued to think of Emeril as a lucky charm, and that many people there missed having him around.
Despite the cold business calculus that led to the use of these proven stars, Bruce and others on the creative side also had an appetite to produce edgier programming. Developing new series to communicate that edgier voice, however, was a messy job with some strange pitches.
Shortly before the launch day for Cooking Channel, Mark Dacascos came to Food headquarters to pitch an idea called Feasts of Fury. With him was Ross LaManna, who had cowritten the scripts for Jackie Chan’s Rush Hour films. In Fury, Mark, better known as the Chairman from Iron Chef America, would travel the world explaining how historical forces, wars especially, had shaped national cuisines.
“For example,” he explained to Bruce, “if we did something in Kazakhstan, right? That’s the home of Genghis Khan. You show me in their garb galloping through the plains, but later on you find out that when the horse was old, you ate it, so you ate your transportation.”
“Uggggh,” Bruce said. “I worry about conflict. It’s such a negative word.”
“We want to tweak it so it doesn’t come off as battle hour,” Ross offered. “We want it to always be uplifting.”
“War is a bit disquieting, eh?” Bruce said, clicking his pen.
Ross kept peddling, trying to focus on the fun elements. “Every week you see a limo pull up and this incredibly good-looking woman comes out from that country and she invites him as a cultural liaison—‘Come to my country.’”
The tour, Mark said, would include “fighting, eating, cooking.”
Bruce asked how all the martial arts in Feasts of Fury would possibly appeal to women. The audience for Cooking Channel was projected to be 60 to 65 percent female, same as Food Network.
Ross parried with a joke about how the fight sequences created a context for Mark to take off his shirt and show his muscular body.
“We’re a family network,” Bruce cautioned.
Ross wheeled. “It’s martial arts for those who want to see it as a dance expression. We could talk about the Battle of Agincourt, what Henry V’s English troops ate versus the food of the French army.”
Bruce had heard enough. He said he’d like to work with Mark on a new show, but with more food, less fighting.
—
As work continued on Cooking Channel, in January 2011 the New York Post reported that Food’s ratings for the fourth quarter of 2010 were down 10.3 percent among viewers 25 to 54, the key demographic for advertisers. Prime-time ratings among women had also slipped badly.
An industry expert opined that in an increasingly competitive TV landscape for food programming, appetites might be changing, and Food Network might not be keeping up. “We know edgier cooking shows such as Kitchen Nightmares are doing well,” Gary Lico, president of research group CableU, told the Post, referring to the Fox broadcast show with Gordon Ramsay.
A Food spokesperson argued that the network’s ratings increases in 2009 had been nearly impossible to sustain. In 2009, the network had seen a 19 percent gain, led by whopping improvements in prime time. Chopped had been up 74 percent over 2008 and the reality series The Next Iron Chef attracted a total of 29 million viewers in its second season, a 60 percent ratings bump. The argument was borne out by the numbers in 2011, when the network stanched the erosion of prime-time ratings. That March was the network’s highest-rated March ever, a 20 percent increase over the previous year, thanks primarily to the success of a short special series, Chopped All-Stars, which made Food Network the number 7–ranked ad-supported cable network in prime time. That summer, The Next Food Network Star on Sunday nights pulled in even stronger ratings. Brooke had overseen the development of a strategy to ma
ke Sunday nights the network’s “tent pole,” under which everything else could flourish. An episode of Star in June 2011 garnered 2.3 million viewers, and the finale on August 14 brought in 4.227 million viewers, making Food the number one network on cable that night among adults 25 to 54.
Likewise, pairing Rachael Ray and Guy on a competition show as mentors to B- and C-list celebrities learning to cook—Rachael vs. Guy—worked as a tent pole in January and February of 2012.
Besides promoting and expanding the tent-pole shows, another way ratings were goosed was a new trick of the cable trade, “stripping:” running back-to-back episodes from the same successful series and pushing every lagging show out of the lineup. A marathon of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives on Fridays was a way to feast on a hit.
But this came at the cost of the seed corn. Food was too big now to devote a half hour a day of “fringe” prime time to a cheaply produced live-to-tape proving ground like Chef Du Jour, where chefs used to get five full episodes to try out on the tube. Early-evening reruns of Everyday Italian were a better bet to sell advertising, contribute to the bottom line, and prime the pump for the sales of Food Network merchandise at Kohl’s. But what was being lost was a chance to discover new, bankable stars. The network, by chucking contestants nightly on its roster of prime-time competition shows, Worst Cooks in America, Star, Next Iron Chef, Chopped, Cupcake Wars, and Sweet Genius, had become expert at quickly labeling potential new talent as “losers” before giving most of them a chance to find their television voices.
No new breakout stars had been created since Guy Fieri won The Next Food Network Star in 2006, and Robert Irvine, who debuted in 2007. Where would the next Bobbies, Rachaels, and Paulas come from? Perhaps nepotism was an answer. Bobby’s daughter, Sophie, was only thirteen when she made a poised appearance on one of his shows. After the Deen boys made the travel series Road Tasted together, they branched off solo. In Not My Mama’s Meals, Bobby Deen took recipes like his mother’s Deep-Fried Macaroni and Cheese and remade them in lower-calorie versions. Mama appeared remotely from Georgia and gave her honest opinion on his efforts—not always favorably! “I’ll stick with mine,” she said of his Guiltless Cheesy Mac, that included chopped cauliflower and reduced-fat sour cream.