by Allen Salkin
At twenty years old and mature, whether Food Network’s future will be as bright as its previous decade is more in its own hands now than before. It can no longer rely on riding the explosively growing waves it caught in its youth. Cable television and foodie culture are mature, too.
As the network announced its roster of new shows for the 2013–14 season, an overwhelming number of them were about how to open a restaurant and become a food professional. After two decades, this seemed to be the logical next step in the foodie fantasy. After watching so many cooking shows, vicariously traveling to so many locales in search of the tastiest morsels, what’s left? Open a restaurant—or vent against those who have but who seem to know less than you about the industry. What’s more, with the ratings success of Restaurant: Impossible, the network, concerned about soft prime-time ratings on other nights at the start of 2013, wanted to crowd out any competition. Copycatting was the rage in cable. The History Channel had Pawn Stars and its sister, A&E, had doubled down with the similar treasure hunt Storage Wars. TruTV volleyed with Hardcore Pawn, HGTV with Flea Market Flip, and even PBS had rushed in with its own junky treasure hunt, Market Warriors. Thus, the thinking went, if Food Network blew out the category of restaurant makeovers, there would be no room for a Top Chef or Cake Boss of copycat restaurant shows by rivals. And so, for Food’s twentieth year, Giving You the Business awarded employees of food chains their own franchises, Food Court Wars had Tyler doling out mall outlets, The Shed (working title) portrayed a family that owns a chain of barbecue joints, On the Rocks featured the advice of a bar owner, Bossover (working title) schooled bad restaurant bosses, Restaurant Divided transformed family-owned spots, Restaurant Express had Robert Irvine taking aspiring owners on a bus trip and awarding one his own eatery, and Undercover Critics gave existing owners a chance to improve before reviews were published. Cooking Channel unveiled The Freshman Class, going back to Food Network’s roots at Johnson & Wales by following four aspiring chefs through the Louisiana Culinary Institute, as well as Restaurant Takeover and Ching’s Menu Makeover.
Also introduced at the April 2013 upfronts was a new show by Bobby Flay—he’d survived again, even though his attempt to sell a daytime talk show featuring himself and Giada to the broadcast networks failed—and, for Cooking Channel, it was Pizza Cuz, a cross-country exploration of all things pizza, a show Joe Langhan would have loved.
Figuring out one good idea and preparing it a dozen ways while trying to fluff up your proven commodities is not exactly a formula for the kind of groundbreaking television Food Network once delivered—and network executives knew it. To that end, a younger generation had been hired into the programming department under Bob, giving him the opportunity to hear new ideas but also signaling that his time to meet the crocodiles might be nearing—everyone in TV meets them eventually. The new hires who might one day succeed him included Lauren Wohl from Ryan Seacrest Productions and Andrew Schecter, formerly of Animal Planet, along with two new vice presidents of programming in March 2013, Todd Weiser, who had developed offbeat shows for Animal Planet, such as Finding Bigfoot and Gator Boys, and Mark Levine, who had been overseeing CookingChannelTV.com. The network had plans to double the number of shows in development—a move Eileen Opatut had begged for years earlier—and sent another programmer out to Los Angeles to engage with West Coast production companies who might pitch fresh ideas.
If the network was having trouble minting new stars, perhaps clever new formats would have to do for a while. Late one night after a charity party hosted by Sandra Lee in New York, the recently crowned winner of 2012’s version of Food Network Star, Justin Warner, a whiz kid chef from Brooklyn, was walking in a not entirely straight line from the SoHo party space toward a downtown bar called Mother’s Ruin.
Justin held up his hand to traffic while stepping into Centre Street, wanting to cross against the light. “Food Network star coming through!” he said.
The traffic didn’t stop.
It took nearly a year for Food Network to produce a show starring Justin, Rebel Eats, a one-off budget road trip program. No future episodes were announced.
The changes the network was being forced to face came into extremely uncomfortable focus in June 2013, when a deposition transcript from a lawsuit involving Paula Deen became public. Lisa Jackson, a former restaurant employee of Deen and her brother, Earl “Bubba” Hiers, filed a racial- and sexual-harassment suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia in March 2012, claiming she was subjected to “violent, sexist, and racist behavior.”
Among the allegations in the original complaint was that Deen had once used the N-word when discussing the arrangements for a wedding. In a videotaped deposition in May 2013, Paula denied it. “I remember telling them about a restaurant that my husband and I had recently visited. . . . The whole entire waitstaff was middle-aged black men, and they had on beautiful white jackets with a black bow tie. I mean, it was really impressive. And I remember saying I would love to have servers like that, I said, but I would be afraid that somebody would misinterpret.”
“Is there any possibility . . . you slipped and used the word . . . ?” she was asked.
“No,” she answered, “because that’s not what these men were. They were professional black men doing a fabulous job.”
Later, the opposing lawyer asked, “Have you ever used the N-word yourself?”
“Yes, of course,” she replied, explaining, “It was probably when a black man burst into the bank that I was working at and put a gun to my head.”
Not good. The National Enquirer ran the first story about the deposition, headlined “Paula Deen’s Racist Confessions Caught on Video!” With the transcript online for any reporter or fan to peruse, a media storm ensued on Wednesday, June 19. “Paula Deen on Her Dream ‘Southern Plantation Wedding’” Talking Points Memo announced. Opinion pieces attacking her followed.
There was controlled panic among Paula’s team. The timing was particularly awful for them because Paula’s contract with Food Network was expiring that very month. The previous time her contract had neared its end—in 2010, two years before the diabetes announcement—Barry and his partner, Jonathan Russo, had played hardball, putting Paula on the open market and making Food Network bid for her against other suitors. Part of what they won was an agreement for the network to give her sons, Jamie and Bobby, each a season of their own shows.
The situation was different this time around, even before the revelations. After the diabetes announcement, Food Network executives were so upset at having been blindsided by it that Paula’s Best Dishes was put on hiatus and no new episodes were shot for about a year. Meanwhile, Nielsen ratings were down 15 percent in total viewers and 22 percent in the key 18-to-49 demographic for the 2012–13 season, compared with the previous one.
Jonathan had been negotiating with Pat Guy at Food Network for months over a new contract for Paula to make more daytime cooking shows. Paula’s team was so sure an agreement would be reached that Follow Productions, the producer of her shows, had already begun preparations to shoot new episodes.
But as with Emeril, she had become an increasingly expensive star who was no longer pulling audiences the way she used to, and it was taking a while to come to an agreement. She was not alone in losing viewers. The only shows seeming to hold their own in the ITK block were Pioneer Woman and Trisha’s Southern Kitchen: new faces. And in prime time, the news was also dispiriting, with a 15 percent decline in total households for the 2012–13 season.
From Food Network’s perspective, much of Paula’s decline was her own fault—at least some fans had not forgiven her for the diabetes deal. Her shows were no longer comfort food. Even before the latest debacle, the two sides were talking about the need to “freshen” Paula’s show, with proposals not unlike those that had been tried with Emeril Live years earlier: invite interesting guests to cook with her, move the show out of her kitchen and into
interesting locales.
Now it was all in doubt. A decision was made by Deen’s team, which included the California-based public relations duo of Jeffrey and Elana Rose, to offer Paula as a guest that Friday, June 21, on the Today Show, the broadcast outlet where she had made the diabetes revelation and other, more happy, and successful appearances. Their hope was that on the Today Show Paula could explain that she was not a racist, that she was simply honestly answering questions that had been put before her in a lawsuit brought by a disgruntled employee who saw the lawsuit as a way to take some of what Paula had earned. The racial slurs were not who she was.
But Barry Weiner, who was down in Savannah with Paula, was becoming concerned as he watched her grow more agitated. It was as if she had been told one of her children had been in a bad car accident. She could not believe that she was been pilloried like this.
To be on the Today Show requires getting out of bed at around 4:30 a.m. and being at the studio, all made up and composed, by 7 a.m. When Barry saw how sleepless and disheveled Paula, a sixty-six-year-old woman, was as the time approached to leave for Rockefeller Center, he advised her not to show up for the interview. He knew it would not be a softball interview and she might completely fall apart. You can’t put someone in a position to be skewered like that. It might haunt her for the rest of her life, he thought, and she, having followed Barry’s advice successfully for more than a decade, agreed.
As the Today broadcast started, Matt told viewers, “We just found out she’s a no-show.”
Rather than quelling the fires, this fed them. Paula’s situation was now a mess playing out across all the points of mass media—TV, cable news, celebrity and food gossip websites, and social media. Exactly what Paula’s team needed to do became clear when a call came to them from Cynthia Gibson, the chief legal officer for Scripps in Knoxville, a respected executive in the parent company. “What we need,” she instructed, “is an unconditional statement of remorse and apology.” There was no promise that if Paula made such a statement, all would be forgiven by her employer, but it offered hope.
Inside Food Network and Scripps, a frenzy had been growing. E-mails and phone calls were ripping back and forth. What should they do? Food Network had little stake in Paula’s side businesses. Barry had resisted network efforts to get in on her action. Food did not get a cut of her clothing line or her new deal endorsing flavored “finishing butters.” Not that they would have wanted it. What good was it that she was occasionally giving a nod to her new slimmer lifestyle by cutting down the fat in her recipes if she was endorsing a brand that showed you how to add it back? Didn’t she get it? Brands need consistency. What did she stand for? For that matter, the message was undermining her own son’s show. Bobby Deen’s Not My Mama’s Meals was predicated on avoiding heart attack ingredients.
Besides being a publicly traded company that complied with all equal-opportunity and anti-harassment laws, SNI maintained its stated core values, among them “compassion and support” and “diversity.” A debate raged within the company about what to do and when to do it. Some wanted her gone immediately. Her contract was up. She had two major strikes against her. Why wait for the third strike? Others counseled patience. Even if they were going to let her go, why do it in the heat of the moment? Better to investigate for a few weeks, see how it played out, and do whatever they were going to do calmly, in their own time.
Consulting on this trouble again was Jesse Derris, who had left Sunshine Sachs and started his own crisis management PR firm. To Jesse, this was a moral question. And if that was the case, if Food Network had decided Paula was conclusively on the wrong side of the moral line here, she would have to be gotten rid of sooner or later. The time to do it was now, when she had taken all the hits and given no significant response. Do it and move on.
Even as this decision was nearing inevitability inside the network, Paula’s team was scrambling to do what Cynthia had suggested, grasping at the idea that a complete apology would redeem her in the eyes of Scripps. The team set about preparing to record their own video apology, something they could control. After noon, a photo was tweeted of Paula preparing to record the video. When it was released soon after, it struck many as strange. Although the video was less than a minute long, there were three spliced-together segments that seemed repetitive and generic: “Please forgive me for the mistakes that I’ve made” was the final line. It almost seemed like a rehearsal—and it was. That video had been accidentally posted on a YouTube account, and then quickly pulled down. Nothing was going right.
Two more videos were then posted intentionally. They showed Paula apologizing more thoroughly and without edits. One was to her public: “The pain has been tremendous that I have caused to myself and to others, and so I am taking this opportunity, now that I’ve pulled myself together and am able to speak, to offer an apology to those that I have hurt. I want people to understand that my family and I are not the kind of people that the press is wanting to say we are. I’ve spent the best of twenty-four years to help myself and others. Your color of your skin, your religion, your sexual preference does not matter to me, but it’s what in the heart.”
And the other was to Matt for not showing up. “I’m a strong woman, but this morning, I was not.”
Both were done very amateurishly. Paula was sitting on an office chair with what appeared to be a makeup tray, a can of Coke, and a partially unfurled roll of paper towel strewn haphazardly on tables behind her.
SNI was a multibillion-dollar publicly traded company. This would just not do. The company made its decision, and it was approved at the highest levels. Brooke called Barry and told him Food Network would not be signing another agreement with Paula.
Moments later, the network released a short statement and said it would not elaborate. “Food Network will not renew Paula Deen’s contract when it expires at the end of this month.”
Now the media fires exploded into an inferno. Paula retreated to her home in Savannah over the weekend with her sons and husband. Her career seemed to have fallen apart in a few days, all because of what she and her family saw as an extortionate lawsuit against her. On Monday, June 24, Smithfield Foods announced it was ending her endorsement deal. Other commercial partners issued statements saying they were considering what to do. Jeff and Elana Rose stopped returning reporters’ calls.
Even as Paula was abandoned, a groundswell of her defenders was starting to grow. Carla Hall, one of the cohosts of The Chew, tweeted, “I love you and I support you @Paula_Deen!” Far more concerning for Food Network was a new Facebook page, “We Support Paula Deen,” which by midweek was nearing half a million followers.
Tony Bourdain was keeping his powder dry. While shooting his CNN show in Italy, he tweeted, “I am ‘continuing to monitor the situation.’” When New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote a piece attacking Paula’s “obtuseness,” Tony, still sore about Frank’s 2011 column criticizing the “elitism” of Tony’s attacks on Paula, simply tweeted about the newspaperman’s “deft 180.”
Inside Food Network, there was fretting. Had they acted too quickly? As legions of fans posted comments on QVC’s website, demanding she be kept, Food Network worried it would lose swaths of female viewers, lowering ad rates. The network pulled back on its own social media—it was not the time to cheerfully tweet links to brownie recipes. Bobby Flay, making a regularly scheduled appearance on Good Morning America, sidestepped the issue expertly, saying, “You know, it’s a real unfortunate situation, but I’m not going to comment on it. I’m here to talk about some ribeye . . .”
Lee Schrager, about to open up ticket sales for the fall Food Network New York City Wine & Food Festival, faced the problem of whether or not to keep Paula’s Gospel Brunch in the lineup. When tickets went on sale Monday, it had stayed.
Tiny victories, but Paula’s future as a public figure was still at stake. Would any broadcaster or corporation ever want her again? Paula�
�s camp, realizing it had not handled this well, finally brought in their own crisis management consultant, one of the heaviest hitters in the business, Judy Smith. She had helped Monica Lewinsky, Michael Vick, and Kobe Bryant. It was decided to try again with the Today Show, scheduling an interview for that following Wednesday, June 26. It was probably too late to get Paula back on Food Network, but maybe she could win back some fans and stem the perception that she was an irredeemable racist.
Well-coached and rested, but emotional, when she finally made her Today appearance on Wednesday morning, Paula sat for an thirteen-minute interview, a long segment for morning TV. Matt asked whether her apology was cynical, whether all she really wanted to do was protect her business interests. Paula said she did not want fans to boycott Food Network.
At the end of her Today interview, she looked at the camera tearfully and said no one was perfect: “If you have no sin, please pick up that stone and throw it so hard at my head that it kills me.”
By the end of the interview, judging by chatter online and among food media people, there was a predictable split between those who thought she’d done a good job and those who thought she seemed to be desperately protecting her business empire, but there was a lot of agreement on the fact that it probably didn’t matter either way. On NBC’s Facebook page, 82 percent of people said the interview did not change their mind about Deen. Some of her other sponsors dropped her. The next day, Reverend Jesse Jackson announced he was helping her, likely a connection made by Judy Smith. “She should be reclaimed rather than destroyed,” he told the Associated Press.