Caitlin pointed out that one of the aspects of Parks I left uncovered is the prevalence of food in the show: Tom's chicky chicky parm parm, Ron and Leslie bonding over breakfast food, Sweetums and Paunch Burger, Ben's calzone obsession, Andy's Skittle sandwich, Ron and Chris's burger cook-off, etc. It's a pretty ridiculous thing for me to forget, all things considered!
At this point, this blog is only being read by people who know me, which means you know I started out with a cooking blog. There's clearly some overlap here.
As much as I am a defender of television, one unfortunate thing remains true: if you love a particular thing that originates outside television, you will almost always find that television's version of it is awful.
Science fiction: sci fi TV is almost universally terrible, and even when it's entertaining, it's often not very good as science fiction. Sci fi TV shows routinely get basic science embarrassingly wrong, prove ignorant of the handling of common tropes in non-televised science fiction and so recapitulate the worst cliches, and more often than not, ignore the consequences of whatever bits and pieces of science fiction that they've incorporated into their otherwise bog-standard story. The major American exceptions are the X-Files, Fringe, and Battlestar Galactica, and even then, the Battlestar Galactica finale functions pretty terribly as science fiction, whatever you think of it purely on the story level.
History: I am a professional historian. The History Channel is fucking terrible. It's not just that it's so fixated on a few small slices of history and rarely ventures outside them, it's that it so often gets things wrong. My first history textbook writing job, I got it by pointing out a simple truth - the company was recruiting fiction writers to work on a project for them (it made sense for the project), and I pointed out that fiction writers, by the nature of their work, begin with a premise or a framework and then do the research that supports that premise. As a fiction writer who happened to also have a Master's in history, I could be trusted to be familiar with neutral and unbiased research, and knew how to evaluate the trustworthiness of sources.
The History Channel is like my strawman fiction writer in this respect. It creates a narrative first, and then finds historians to provide the sound bites to support it. A special on "historians talk about the real Biblical Exodus" is one real-life example: consensus among ancient historians is that there was no Exodus, but consensus was ignored, and various less-likely scenarios discussed without any weighting or explanation of the evidence. Sometimes, watching the History Channel, you get the impression that all historians do is sit around thinking about what history might have been like, and then writing down their guesses.
Science: The Discovery Channel is nearly as bad as the History Channel, except when rebroadcasting BBC productions. Thankfully, Nova and Nature exist, over on PBS.
Etc. etc.
When it comes to food and cooking ... well, obviously most cooking shows are not very good. In particular they're not very good as instruction. On the other hand, there's so fucking much out there now that there's still more good stuff today than there's ever been in the past, even if the ratio of good to bad is pretty low.
So why not, let's go down the list.
Travel porn
I'm sure there was an earlier antecedent -- maybe the Frugal Gourmet went to France or something? -- but the food/cooking genre's modern travel porn show originates with A Cook's Tour, Anthony Bourdain's first show, on the Food Network. It was released in conjunction with his memoir of the same name, on the strength of his first memoir, Kitchen Confidential -- which later became a brief-lived-but-good (not quite "brilliant but canceled") sitcom with a post-Alias Bradley Cooper as "Jack Bourdain," with Nicholas Brendon, John Francis Daley, Jaime King, John Cho, and Erinn Hayes in the supporting cast.
This is the only video I'm including in this post, because for the last week or two, Blogger has been doing this weird thing where every time I add a video to a post, it removes the previous video I had added. That MSCL post took forever.
A Cook's Tour was pretty fantastic, especially for the time (15 years ago now!). We've gotten used to a dozen shows whose hosts travel to Vietnam, Portugal, and Morocco to try traditional or unusual dishes, but it's an enormous step forward in using television to help people understand food, rather than just using cumin and olives to "make that burger Moroccan." Bourdain's demeanor -- not entirely the polar opposite of the sunny game show host type we usually get on travel shows -- helped too. A Cook's Tour only lasted two seasons, and Bourdain moved on to a Travel Channel show, No Reservations, which was substantially similar. At times his schtick wore thin, but by then we had so many other options.
Bizarre Foods, with Andrew Zimmern, is the best of the rest. I avoided it for a long time because of the name -- I hate the xenophobia that accompanies so much internet coverage of unusual or ethnic dishes, the "oh my God, can you believe people eat that?" But Zimmern really enjoys most of what he samples, and is at least interested in the stuff that turns out not to be to his taste. He's a food adventurer, not just pointing and laughing. Sadly, the show must have gone through some budget cuts -- the original globe-trotting Bizarre Foods was replaced by Bizarre Foods America, a number of repackaged clips shows, and now Bizarre Foods Destinations, a half-hour show.
The Esquire Network's -- yes, there's an Esquire Network -- The Getaway is a real mixed bag. Each episode, a celebrity host jaunts off to somewhere they like, and the show is about half food, half shopping/attractions. Maybe 70:30. Needless to say, some celebrities are foodies -- or whatever word you prefer -- and some aren't. I DVR the show but don't always finish the episode. Chrissy Teigen, Aziz Ansari, Jose Andres, and Rashida Jones have been high points, while Adam Pally's episode was like watching a bunch of fratbros be fratbros.
Booze Traveler is surprisingly good. I didn't expect it to be -- so much of the Travel Channel is insubstantial fluff -- but the host, Jack Maxwell, seems to actually know what he's talking about, and asks the right questions. It's also not just a "wooo, now let's get drunk in THIS city!" show. That said, it's still just travel porn -- you can't do much with this.
Restaurant porn
Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives was the Food Network's answer to a show the Travel Channel used to do, the name of which I've long forgotten -- it was the standard "host goes to city X, visits restaurant Y to talk to you about their interesting specialty of the house" show, but DDD brought Bourdain-like branding to the mix rather than encourage the host's blandness and let the food take center stage. The results are mixed, obviously. Guy Fieri looks like a cartoon. A cartoon of an energy drink mascot or maybe something from a Mountain Dew and Doritos commercial in the 90s.
But the concept of hitting holes-in-the-wall, of putting barbecue and tacos on the same level as steakhouses and fine dining, is a terrific one, and suited the zeitgeist as this weird foodie/chowhound/whatever movement of the last decade and a half gained steam. And the places I've been to that have been featured on DDD have all been great. You just have to close your ears when he's talking -- not just because of how loud and obnoxious he so often is, but because what he has to say rarely seems necessary, and is frequently just plain wrong.
Hamburger America was a particular favorite of mine that ran on the Travel Channel, if I remember right. George Motz hit the road to cover some of the same burger joints in his classic book of the same name.
I almost don't want to bring up Bite This with Nadia G. Caitlin and I love it -- I mean, it's one of our favorite shows -- and I've never seen anyone else bring it up. It's on the Cooking Channel, which isn't exactly high-profile (it's one of the channels that isn't in HD for us, for instance). I've occasionally seen Nadia herself mentioned derisively on message boards by people who still want all cooking shows to be the cook-along-as-you-watch kind. Anyway, like Fieri, Nadia definitely has a schtick and a larger than life presence, and if you don't find her funny, don't bother with the show. But she knows her shit.
Talent show horseshit
Competition shows are pretty rough going. Arguably the top of the heap in the reality genre, this is still close to calling them the sweetest-smelling turds. Like everybody within a certain age range, I went nuts over Iron Chef when it first broadcast in the early days of the Food Network, and I've occasionally tuned in to the American version, if only for the always entertaining Mark Dacascos (Mani from Brotherhood of the Wolf!) and the terrific Cat Cora. But Iron Chef is clearly a different thing from the rest of these American Idol type shows, where a group of cooks competes over the course of a season in challenges ranging from the reasonable to the ridiculous.
That said, I've seen every season of Top Chef and have strong feelings about many of them -- Carla was robbed, Nick was a tool, and the Kristin/Brooke finale is probably the peak of the show. The most recent season was marred by the unbelievable terribleness of Aaron, but somewhat redeemed by the overall excellence of the final five.
However, as has been written about in a number of places, the overall quality of Top Chef has gone down in recent years. The caliber of contestant seems to be lower, whether because certain key chefs aren't letting their staff participate or because there are so many fucking shows out there and the barrel has been scraped. Eric Ripert, Emeril Lagasse (who has demonstrated his competence and intelligence a number of times on Top Chef, making you forget how bigger than life his brand had become for a few years), and even Tony Bourdain have been less involved. The change in recent seasons in which, in some episodes, the judges comment on contestants' food immediately rather than making them wait for judges' table didn't improve the format any. This may be a franchise that needs to be put to bed for a few years.
I never thought I would watch a Gordon Ramsay show -- the aggro yelling is not something I need in my life -- but I've watched two of the three seasons of Masterchef Junior and they were kind of delightful. Do not read internet comments about them. Seeing people on cooking message boards go on about how fat an eleven year old is, or refer to another preteen contestant as faggy ... well, maybe this is the demographic Ramsay pulls in.
Instructional stuff
This used to be the only kind of cooking show there was, man. I grew up watching Julia, the Frugal Gourmet, Martin Yan, and Graham Kerr, and when I was in college, Emeril still had his first show -- the pretaped one without an audience, where he was much more toned-down. I learned a lot from those shows, at a time when it was a hell of a lot harder to learn about cooking from the internet.
And there's certainly a lot of these shows still out there. Aside from Avec Eric, with the masterful Eric Ripert, I'm interested in almost none of them. I honestly can't tell if this is a reflection of their quality or not. For one thing, I've been cooking to some degree or another for thirty years now, and have cooked the overwhelming majority of the meals I've eaten for the last twenty-four. I have cooked pigs heads and goats heads and bonded chicken skin to steak with transglutaminase and clarified cucumber juice for cocktails and steeped green walnuts in vodka for nocino. I've cured and hung my own country ham, I've made Monterey jack cheese with ramps, I've candied fingerlimes and I have a bag of jaboticaba in the freezer. I maybe don't have a lot to learn from most cooking shows anymore.
But I know at some point I stopped watching them because I stopped feeling like the makers of the show had any belief that I was going to replicate the cooking I was watching. They started to feel like a sort of performative food porn, more like the behind the scenes featurettes on a movie's DVD release than like something instructional that actually expected my participation.
I mean, it's not a coincidence that as this interest in "cooking" has grown over the course of this yet-young century, so too have the number of stores selling pre-cut vegetables, pre-marinated meats, and frozen meals separated into assemble-it-yourself pouches that for some reason cost more than the frozen meals that come already assembled. There is a lot of cooking theater out there, a lot of noise from people who only cook once a month but make a big fucking deal about it when they do, which is a significant move away from cooking as a normal adult life skill and towards a fetishism that, even as a food blogger, I am uncomfortable with.
Oddballs
Mind of a Chef is probably the best food-related TV show, and it really doesn't fit any of these categories. Maybe it's the heir to the instructional shows, in a way -- instead of showing you how to put a recipe together, the idea is to get into how a given chef approaches food and the restaurant business, and where inspiration for a recipe can come from. That's the sort of thing that's much more useful and meaningful than recipes: learning to think about food is like learning fluency in a language instead of just memorizing a handful of vocabulary words.
I'm partial to the Sean Brock half-season since he's a chef who's such an influence on me, but the most recent half-season with Magnus Nilsson was terrific.
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