From Scratch

by Allen Salkin

  Novo offered Paula around $6 million, and in exchange, she would announce that she was suffering from diabetes, had started taking Victoza, and was changing her diet. People could find some of her new recipes on a Novo website.

  Barry and Paula did not consult with Food Network about any of this. Novo wanted Paula to make her announcement with as big a splash as possible, and suggested that a slot on the top-rated Today Show would be best. In January 2012, Paula appeared with Al Roker and told him that she had started treatment after being diagnosed three years earlier. She referred viewers to a website she had set up with Novo Nordisk which would contain healthy recipes.

  Al, a journalist, not a shill, pointed out that Deen was a paid spokesperson for Novo Nordisk.

  “I have been compensated, just as you are for your work,” said Deen defensively.

  Al, undeterred, asked if there was something awry with her touting a diabetes drug after pushing fattening food on TV for years. Paula responded that she only tapes shows part of the year. “That’s only thirty days out of three hundred and sixty-five, and it’s for entertainment.”

  Her answers struck many as disingenuous, and the reaction was brutal. After all, she had gotten rich touting recipes like her sandwich consisting of a hamburger with a fried egg on top served between slices of a glazed doughnut. Now she was pushing Gingered Butternut Squash and Green Apple Mash? Among many critics, Tony Bourdain was the loudest, tweeting to his hundreds of thousands of followers, “Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, so I can profitably sell crutches later.”

  Food Network’s media relations chief, Irika Slavin, a former Warner Brothers publicist in Hollywood, asked Jesse Derris to devise a strategy to distance the network from Paula. She was still an important star, but she had not consulted with the network before making the diabetes deal, so why should it be shackled to the resulting bad publicity? Food did not want the whole ship to be dragged down. Following Derris’s advice, Irika called reporters and pointed out that Food Network had not been complicit in hiding Paula’s diabetes. If the network had known of the diagnosis before the Today announcement, it might have suggested that the current season of Paula’s cooking shows take a new, healthier approach, or at least acknowledge that one ought not to eat these treats every day. Perhaps they could have synchronized her show with her son Bobby’s Not My Mama’s Meals.

  Instead, Irika said, the network had a season of unmitigated Paula in the can and felt blindsided.

  Groundwork laid, Irika engaged in positive spin, announcing that the network had healthy programming debuting: Fat Chef, a weight-loss challenge show. Then, deflecting attention away from Food Network, she mentioned that Sam Talbot, a Top Chef contestant (and Sunshine Sachs client) who was diabetic, had a new cookbook out, and he could speak seriously about the disease.

  The strategy seemed to blunt the blow. People magazine nicely roped Food’s competitor into the problem: “Top Chef Sam Talbot: My Advice to Paula Deen” ran the headline of an article on Talbot in which he suggested she replace sugar with coconut and flaxseed.

  At the SOBE festival a month later, Paula led a cooking demonstration with her husband and answered questions from a crowd of more than a thousand fans. She told them she had given up sweet tea and was walking thirty minutes a day.

  “Miss Paula?” one fan asked. “Miss Paula, right here. Listen, we love you. So don’t worry about the haters. Because there’s so many of us that love you, it’s like the haters don’t even exist.” The audience cheered wildly.

  Barry Weiner, watching in the wings, noted how much affection was pouring her way.

  “Paula’s brand,” he told me, “is not butter. Paula’s brand, if anything, is hope.”

  Fortunately, by the time Tony Bourdain came onstage, she and her team had departed, driven by Lee Schrager’s staff in golf carts toward the Loews Hotel, where she had a room with a smoking balcony.

  In the audience of equal size to Paula’s were many of the smartest writers, chefs, and publicists in food media, eager to hear what the outspoken and dangerous man might say this time.

  “First question!” Tony opened, pointing to a friend he had planted in the audience, the chef Eddie Huang.

  “Aren’t you a hypocrite,” Eddie asked, “smoking on your show and making fun of this nice old lady with diabetes?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” said Tony mockingly. “You’re right. I did smoke cigarettes for a lot of years on my show. But I wasn’t selling you motherfucking cigarettes!”

  The crowd roared.

  “I didn’t sell ‘Smoking Tony’ dolls to your kids! You couldn’t go to five or six casinos around the world to the Tony Bourdain smoking fucking section! And when I found a spot on my motherfucking lung, I didn’t wait three years so I could get a deal selling you the patch!”

  Tony had been attacking her for years, and Paula had long ago decided to laugh him off. In some ways, he and Paula were a lot more alike than they were different: food stars who can be gifted at expressing themselves, work hard, and were unafraid to be who they are. Paula, a gambler like so many TV cooking stars, once lost nearly $50,000 during a weekend binge in Las Vegas. “I don’t think he has the ability to make or break my career,” Paula had told me before the festival, “especially when he’s going around eating unwashed anuses of wildebeests.”

  In the months following the diabetes announcement, the controversy gave Paula a whole new market to work. She was a celebrity guest playing for charity on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, endorsed a new line of Paula Deen mattresses, and sailed with four hundred fans on her annual “Party at Sea” on a cruise ship. She had a popular Paula Deen line of couches, tables, and love seats. She had turned it around like only the greatest steel magnolia can. Within a year, she and her two boys were on the cover of People magazine: “Paula Deen’s Family Slim-down, Exclusive Diet Tips and Recipes. How the star chef dropped more weight and got her sons and husband fit. ‘If the Deens can do it, anyone can!’”

  Like her idol Martha Stewart, it seemed nothing could keep her down. Paula was money. “Now she’s endorsing sugar-free chocolate,” Barry Weiner boasted. “I doubled her brand.”

  —

  The network introduced a new logo in January 2013, the first significant update since the logo Jeff Wayne’s wife had approved in 1997, but as it approached its twentieth anniversary the viewer comments on the network’s blog reflected a change, a sense that the network was a big corporation lagging far behind the vanguard of foodie culture. The new logo beefed up the font and added a thin metallic edge and a slight gradation of color, but the public’s reaction to it indicated that the channel had lost some street cred.

  “Work on your programming instead of logos! I’m so sick of Chopped, all the food wars, and Iron Chef everything!”

  —A COMMENTER USING THE SCREEN NAME OKIE

  “The new logo has no flavor. It looks hard, cold, and generic.”

  —GARNISH

  “What a hunk of shit. Change that was clearly directed by some-one in marketing.”

  —PENN

  The network wasn’t unaware of this changing attitude and Ken told investors the hope was that Cooking Channel would take a “deeper dive” into the food-obsessed cultural wave. But when Cooking went live on May 31, 2010, a critic for the St. Petersburg Times wrote, “Foodography, an hourlong bio-style report on a single topic hosted by TV personality Mo Rocca, repeated the same ice-cream episode so many times the first week I felt like I was trapped in the movie Groundhog Day.”

  No matter. Cooking’s ratings were beyond all projections, doubling Fine Living’s audience during parts of the day and up 70 percent total and 34 percent in prime time. Without having to staff an entire network from scratch, Brooke had delivered an impressive new source of income to Scripps.

  A new generation discovered Two Fat Ladies. Bruce Seidel flew to England to meet
with the surviving Fat Lady, Clarissa Dickson Wright, about creating a new version of the show by pairing her with another riding and cooking partner. Perhaps a gay man? But a deal did not come together.

  Michael Smith had argued from the start that if there was room on cable for a variety of news channels—MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, Headline News, and Fox News—there would be room for more than one food channel. He was less interested in developing an audience slowly by finding a unique voice than in putting things on the air that attracted the biggest audience possible as fast as possible. This led to a disjointed schedule. In the late evening, Cooking Channel delivered the fresh and campy Bitchin’ Kitchen, starring the Elvira of cooking, Nadia Giosia, a Canadian Slav with a macabre energy and a quick wit. But the daytime hours could see fare as regressive as Drop 5 Pounds with Good Housekeeping.

  In the executive programming ranks at Food, only the most risk-averse seemed to thrive. Bob Tuschman, the head of programming, is a politically savvy fellow with some strong personal connections with the talent. As Susie was to Emeril, he is to Ina Garten; the executive she is closest to and can confide in. Eileen Opatut had tried to make it as an independent producer and landed a show on Cooking Channel, Hungry Girl, starring diet guru Lisa Lillien. When the series was canceled, Eileen became so disillusioned that she moved into the real estate business. Matt Stillman is an independent producer still dreaming up show ideas—one is a comedy based on TED Talks—but he has not set foot in the Food Network in a decade. Younger programming talent under Bob must run a gauntlet that over the years adopted the conservative ways of Knoxville and left behind the swashbuckling spirit of Reese.

  Even what counts as a risk-taker at Food might be a reactionary at another network. Would Feasts of Fury really be such a bad idea? Imagine an over-the-top campy show where a kung fu fighter is shown being led around the world by a series of beautiful, ethnically diverse women who feed him, laugh at his jokes, and breathlessly watch him kickbox and fence, relaxing with a few too many Singhas on the banks of the Mekong when the fighting is done. Maybe too weird, but there was a time not so long ago when someone at Food might have authorized a pilot to find out. Nancy Dubuc, the president of entertainment and media at A&E Network, who took History Channel from the number 11 cable network to number 4 in six years, made the cover of The Hollywood Reporter at the end of 2012 for being a risk-taker who had brought a series of unlikely hits to air: Pawn Stars, American Pickers, Hatfields & McCoys, and Duck Dynasty, a reality series about a family who went from rags to riches by selling duck calls. Food had no Nancy Dubuc and did not seem capable of handling one. In 2013, Dubuc was named chairwoman of A&E Networks.

  In January 2012, Bruce Seidel resigned. He was fed up with being told he needed to spend more time thinking about Food Network and less about Cooking Channel. He moved to Los Angeles and launched a YouTube cooking channel called Hungry, owned by Electus, an entertainment company formed by Ben Silverman, the former cochairman of NBC Entertainment. Some of Bruce’s first shows showed the type of thing he’d hoped to land on Cooking Channel: Brothers Green, featuring a pair of Brooklynite musicians and underground caterers, and Casserole Queens, about two Austin woman obsessed with retro food.

  In Bruce’s wake, some of the programming on Cooking appeared to be more like Food Network 2 and was less that of an edgy alternative channel that, given time, might develop its own voice and attract a new audience. The schedule in mid-2012, two years after the launch, included regular helpings of Giada, Ina, and Tyler. There were old episodes of Unwrapped and Good Eats.

  —

  Meanwhile, the new shows appearing on Food’s schedule seemed joined by themes of paranoia, ego, and conflict. Restaurant Stakeout was a reality series about spying on employees, as was Mystery Diners. Both thrived on finding dirt, lust, stupidity, and thievery. Rachael had stopped making new episodes of 30 Minute Meals, focusing instead on her daytime syndicated talk show and, for Food, the prime-time reality conflict drama Rachael vs. Guy, in which they oversaw washed-up celebrities grasping for shards of broken fame. The most comforting show left in prime time was Chopped, which, despite its charms, did feature a tribunal of hypercritical judges. (There was talk of an anniversary episode featuring a ravenous Chihuahua, but to date, no dog.)

  At a recent SOBE festival party thrown by William Morris Endeavor for its food clients, Guy, Bobby, Rachael, Brooke, Susie, Giada, Jon Rosen, and dozens of other industry players sipped champagne and grazed at a table spread with pink charcuterie.

  At the end of the bar, Irika Slavin was threatening Bobby. His new series, America’s Next Great Restaurant, produced by Magical Elves, the company that made Top Chef, was debuting on NBC in a few weeks. Food had tried to get the show, but Magical Elves went with NBC, the parent of Bravo, with whom they’d had so much success. Worse, from Food’s perspective, Bobby’s show was scheduled to run on Sunday nights opposite Chopped All-Stars, one of Food’s tent poles. The talk around the network was that he was risking his standing as a big cable star by taking a gamble on broadcast network television. If his show failed, or if the ratings for Throwdown faltered because of viewer fatigue, he would rue the day he got too big for his britches.

  “We’re watching the stats,” Irika muttered harshly to Bobby, implying that if his show did not do well in the ratings, it would illustrate that he wasn’t as big a star as he thought. Irika knew enough to hire an outside crisis team to deal with straying talent, but not enough to give some respect to a star who had been reliable for nearly two decades. Bobby kept a cool silence. He was a survivor. He already had a plan to deal with any contingency. He was well aware that Throwdown was getting tired after seven seasons. He was working on a new show idea for Food. Or wherever. Bobby knew that Irika might stick around for years or she might be gone by the next festival. But the network needed proven stars like him more than ever, and it wasn’t exactly minting Bobby Flays these days, was it?

  —

  In some ways, the network had perfected its programming recipe around 2003. Its greatest generation of In the Kitchen stars were in their first blush of success, including Ina, Rachael, Sandy, Giada, and Paula; Emeril Live was chugging in prime time; Tony Bourdain was delivering offbeat spice on A Cook’s Tour; Bobby Flay was working with fire on Boy Meets Grill; the original Iron Chef was giving a mind-bending twist to weekend nights; Alton was hitting his stride on Good Eats; Tyler was traveling to southern Europe for the first year of the most fun show he ever made, Tyler’s Ultimate; Marc Summers was churning out new episodes of Unwrapped, and Mario, Sara, and Jamie were still sizzling. No crisis management PR was needed. Most press was favorable and you could turn on the network almost any time of day for good-natured, interesting entertainment and images of tasty food.

  The debut of Top Chef, the network’s biggest challenger, was still years away. But, it did arrive, and in recent seasons, one of the most popular judges to join the cast has been a knowledgeable, award-winning, low-key chef named Emeril Lagasse.

  —

  In 1992, Tryg Myhren had told Joe that a food channel could expand someday into a magazine, cookbooks, and other properties, all generating profits. Scripps food websites, now including foodnetwork.com, cookingchanneltv.com, and food.com, attracted 435 million page views in November 2012 and more than 11.2 million video plays. Meanwhile, a paid smartphone app, In the Kitchen, was at the top of the culinary category on iTunes. Amazon announced a deal in February 2013 to deliver Food Network and other Scripps shows such as Cupcake Wars, Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, and Chopped on demand via the Web—no cable TV subscription required. The brand was thriving in print, too. Food Network Magazine was miraculously still growing, the number one food magazine and the seventh best-selling magazine overall on the newsstand.

  Reese Schonfeld had written to ProJo in 1992, “I am absolutely convinced that the Food Channel is a business that will be worth between $250,000,000 and $500,000,000 on the day that it is carried in 40
,000,000 cable homes.” Twenty years later it was in nearly 100 million American homes and worth roughly $3 billion. Cooking Channel had reached 59 million homes. Scripps Networks Interactive had a market capitalization of $8.7 billion—and investment brokers were speculating in the press that Disney might be considering buying SNI for $10 billion. Derek Baine, a respected industry consultant at SNL Kagan, said that the Fox Group, Rupert Murdoch’s new entertainment company, disencumbered of its newspapers, could be a contender to buy SNI, as could Discovery. Those companies had the leverage of their successful channels to extract higher affiliate fees for Food Network and Scripps’s other channels. Or with Tribune emerging finally from a long bankruptcy process, the Chicago company might be willing to sell its 30 percent of Food Network and Cooking Channel to Scripps. Scripps could then sell the whole shebang or come up with new avenues to capitalize. Anything could happen. Food Network was a big prize.

  To some extent its success will remain tied to how interested the culture at large remains in food. Food Network has ridden the astounding food wave and even shaped it, both the network and the wave propelled by the simultaneous expansion of the public’s interest in food, and cable and satellite television and the Internet. But waves that big are not controllable.

  The head start Food Network had gained by having Joe Langhan get a recipe-rich website up in the mid-1990s before food media rivals did was no longer enough to ensure a market edge in the evolving digital world. Many media companies faced the issue of how to continue to make money amidst DVRs and cable-bill-weary consumers turning to streaming media. Scripps was aggressively trying to keep pace, signing the Amazon agreements and spreading its programming globally and, in April 2013, buying the Asian Food Channel. Turn on your TV in Ulan Bator, Sofia, Belgrade, or Nicosia and you might see Rachael Ray. For American viewers staying tethered to cable and satellite providers, the network invested so heavily in improving production values that it had an effect on corporate profits. SNI net income was down 3.7 percent in the first quarter of 2013 compared to a year earlier, even though revenues had increased 11 percent to $594 million—$208 million of which came from Food Network, now bringing in more cash than HGTV, and $26.3 million from Cooking Channel, a 33 percent improvement for the upstart.