Food Network Descended Into Obscurity Years Ago
I think I've watched “The Kitchen” maybe once. It's got a decent panel of hosts. I've especially always liked Geoffrey Zakarian. Jeff Mauro can be a bit tedious and I can take or leave Sunny Anderson and Katie Lee (when did she add “Biegel?”) But the reason I am not mourning the loss of the show is the same reason that I never watched it in the first place. It's on Food Network and Food Network descended into obscurity years ago.
Somebody (user-gbidhgb5a8, to be specific) commenting on the impending (December 13) demise of “The Kitchen”, went to great pains to do some pertinent research. He discovered that in a given week – the week of October 20 through 26 – the once vital, exciting, innovative and relevant channel was devoting a scant nine percent of its programming time to actual cooking shows of the type it once pioneered and was noted for.
Back in the day, the day being almost any day in the early 2000s, I sat and absolutely absorbed the likes of Emeril Lagasse, Mario Batali, Giada De Laurentiis, Bobby Flay, Michael Chiarello, Ina Garten, the late Anne Burrell and a host of other people who could actually cook and who could show you how to cook like they did. Alton Brown and his often offbeat “Good Eats” was must-see TV. About the only competition-style show aired by the network in those days was a takeoff on the classic Japanese cooking show “Iron Chef” called “Iron Chef America.”
Back then, by the time you watched a week's worth of high-quality, information-laden programming on Food Network, you could almost credit yourself with week's worth of culinary school education.
But now? As user-gbidhgb5a8 notes, out of a total of 168 programming hours, the so-called “Food Network” offers 144 hours of absolute and nearly unwatchable dreck. I'm sure Guy Fieri is a nice guy, but you can only watch “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” so many times before your eyes begin to bleed and your brain turns to mush. And Chopped, Guy's Grocery Games, Beat Bobby Flay, Halloween Wars, Wizards of Baking, Worst Cooks in America, Alex vs. America, Bobby's Triple Threat, Wildcard Kitchen, Last Chef Standing and others on and on ad nauseam to the tune of 118 mind boggling hours is just insane. And don't forget the nine hours of time featuring early morning and/or overnight paid programming that I would be astounded to find anybody actually watching. That's five percent, by the way, compared to the nine percent they give to cooking shows.
“The Kitchen”, which premiered in 2014, just as the onrushing wave of mindless game shows was taking hold, was the last bastion of the old-style “dump and stir” shows. True, its panel of hosts spent a good deal of time talking about food and cooking, but they also presented recipes and techniques that you could take into your own kitchen. Not quite as hard core as some of the earlier cooking shows, but still – technically, at least – a cooking show in its own right.
And now it's gone. Unnamed sources say that “The Kitchen” has been canceled as a result of Food Network “evaluating resources and its priorities” ahead of the new year. Yeah. Right.
I don't know what they'll replace it with. The creativity well at Food Network has long since gone dry, leaving only a murky wet bottom from which to scrape new lows in quality programming. Maybe something featuring a knock down, drag out fight between the Chick-fil-A cows and a bunch of chickens. That would be compelling viewing by current standards. (And if something like that shows up on the air in the future, let this serve as my notice that I want creative credit for the idea, dammit.)
So addio Geoffrey et.al. I'm sure the fans who followed your show weekly for ten years will deeply miss you. And even though I never really watched you because your show aired after I had relegated your network to the dustbin of relevancy, I'll miss you, too. Or at least I'll miss what you represented: a clear note of a real cooking show amid the blaring, cacophonous brass of dull, boring, repetitive, colorless, insipid, lackluster and uninspiring effluvium currently being foisted off on a diminishing viewership by a once respected source for decent culinary programming.
