Do you remember when MTV played music all the time? Or even most of the time? I do. And as I've watched the Food Network over the years, cooking has become less and less important. Really starting to get to a point where there is little cooking at all.
Just a few years ago, if you wanted to learn how to cook something all you needed to do was watch the Food Network. Often times you would find several different hosts making the same thing or something very similar. There were a few shows that weren't about cooking but about food in general, such as Unwrapped or The Best Thing I Ever Ate. But now switch to that channel and most of what you see are game shows, none of which are about teaching you how to cook. And they all have judges that are "expert chefs" that are "world renowned." I'm not saying that I don't enjoy them but when every show during prime time is a game show, it kind of gets annoying. I started watching the channel to learn how to cook things that I had never done before. Sure I can use a recipe, but there is something about watching someone do it that makes it seem possible. That is now lost because all of these chefs want to be a judge on one of these game shows or they want to be an Iron Chef (the original game show that made being a chef in Japan respectable). I get why they want to be an Iron Chef, I just hate that it's now a yearly game show just to decide who the next one will be.
And if it isn't a game show or some kind of contest, it's really a show that belongs on the Travel Channel. You know exactly what I'm talking about, Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Again, they don't teach you how to cook, they only show you behind the scenes of restaurants where the host constantly compliments the chef on the food. Ever notice that they like everything? Come on, not everything can be one of the best burgers you've had!
I've heard interviews of the executives from Food Network stating that this is what America wants, cooking shows in the afternoon while "mom is deciding on what to prepare for dinner" and fun during the evening. Don't believe me? Alton Brown interviewed a couple of the executives from the Food Network on his podcast, the Alton Browncast (great show by the way), and those are basically what they said. I was hoping that when they launched the Cooking Channel it would help this but it doesn't seem to have done anything except give them a place to air re-runs of older shows to make space for these game shows. Sure, there's a unique show here and there but not many.
And both channels are suffering from the same issue as every other network, where they take a popular show and remake it with different people and a different name (Restaurant: Impossible and Restaurant Redemption for example). They also replay these shows over and over again. I get running them late at night, but having one episode of a show air 10 or more times in the week following it's first airing is a bit much.
Do these networks think that all we want is entertainment? I'm not saying that they have to eliminate all of the entertainment factor, just mix it in with the educational pieces.
No comments:
Post a Comment