WHAT'S BECOME OF FOODTV

As many of you know, I spend the majority of the day surfing the net and reading articles at the NYTimes and various blogs while pretending to work. (And really, who doesn't? I know that many of you are procrastinating right now and reading my blog.) Sometimes I do get work done. Like on Mondays. When I pay bills. But I digress. Here I am sitting at work today and visiting one of my favorites sites, Serious Eats, when I found a link to an article written on Michael Ruhlman's blog (which I know about but almost never read. I should read it more) by Anthony Bourdain. He's guest blogging on Ruhlman's blogging and gives his own rundown on the current roster of FoodTV personalities. The post is HILARIOUS. So here it is.

So as many of you have read (in the New York Times, New Yorker and all over) or have observed for yourself, FoodTV programming is in serious decline. They gotten rid of most of the serious professional chefs and replaced them with idiots like Sandra Lee and Rachel Ray. These days, I mainly watch for reruns of the Barefoot Contessa (though they seem to be rerunning the same 10 episodes), Alton Brown, Ace of Cakes (I like the fact that he's running a business) and the occasional Iron Chef America Matchup. There's rarely anything on after 7:30pm that's worth watching. So I think Bourdain summarizes the decline well. If you go on to read the comments section (which is super long, there are like 300 comments and I probably read 10), I think this sums up my current opinion of FoodTV perfectly:

"Maybe it's me, but when I turn on the FOOD NETWORK, I'd kind of like to see some cooking. But it seems that most of their evening shows are about food, but don't always show cooking. Sure, there's Emeril, but how long before he's usurped by Queen Yum-O? The evening shows are more about entertainment (food competitions, etc.) than about actually learning about food (aside from Alton) or cooking. If you want to see actual cooking shows, you gotta watch during the day ... but drat the luck, many of us actually WORK during the day and can't watch. I really miss some of the early days of the network when there were ACTUAL cooks doing ACTUAL cooking on the network, and you could actually LEARN something about food and cooking. Now it's just a spectatator sport ... oh wait, Iron Chef is entirely a spectator sport! The American version isn't too bad, but it does lack the supreme cheesiness of the Japanese version."