Man Surely Cannot Live by Emeril Alone

Cable’s Food Network is cooking up a new recipe, which it hopes will get many more viewers salivating.

The new look, which will start showing up on air at the end of June, is more theme restaurant than intimate bistro, more street food than haute cuisine. Fans of the exuberant Emeril Lagasse will likely rejoice; those who think the channel already has too many of his “Bams!” may be less enthralled.

Lagasse’s show, which has helped draw more viewers to the world of cooking and inspired fierce debate in the food community at the same time, has the flavor the Food Network is trying to impart to more of its shows. “He has demystified food,” says Eric Ober, the channel’s president.

“He can play and entertain, at the same time as he cooks. It’s not life or death. It’s food,” adds Judy Girard, senior vice president, content development, for parent Scripps Networks.

Lagasse’s various shows, including reruns, now air on the network for 3 1/2 hours per day, and draw a much broader audience than the typical food show; about half his viewers are men who like his less-structured approach and freewheeling use of spices.

The Food Network has developed a strong brand, in part thanks to Lagasse, but it needs a broad audience, and a much bigger one, if it is to survive. Perhaps more than any other cable channel, the Food Network is dependent on its ratings to make money: in its early days, to get skeptical cable systems to carry it, the channel agreed to forego for 10 years the standard per-subscriber cable fees that almost all other cable channels receive, making the channel largely ad-revenue dependent until 2003.

Until recently, that meant that the channel had an annual programming budget of well under $15 million, the lowest of any mainstream cable network, according to a person familiar with the figures. To work within that budget, the network hired an in-house crew at its Manhattan studio and produces almost all the shows there, giving them a similar feel, despite themes that vary from produce to Asian cooking.

The new schedule will include many more shows produced outside the studio, which are meant to give viewers a more participatory feel, so their experience isn’t “purely vicarious,” says Ober. There’s “Best Of,” a show that will look across the country for, say, the best soul food or the best restaurant views. “Extreme Cuisine” will search out the most expensive plate of French fries or the oddest food festivals. “Calling All Cooks” will go into people’s homes and neighborhoods in search of family recipes from nonprofessional chefs. A series of Sunday night documentaries, some produced by CBS News, will profile famous food people, as well as old-time hangouts such as Chasen’s in Beverly Hills.

Putting Action on the Front Burner

In the category of what Ober calls “action adventure” shows, the network plans “Food to the Rescue,” which will send a culinary SWAT team to viewers’ homes to solve food problems such as having to prepare dinner for the new boss. A game show, “Taste Test,” which will test contestants’ food knowledge, will also join the schedule, which already includes “Ready, Set, Cook,” where two chefs race a clock to prepare dishes from on odd jumble of ingredients. The network also acquired “Iron Chef,” an intense Japanese cook-off show that has a cult cable following in San Francisco.

The new shows, which will push mostly reruns off the air, will be paid for from a programming budget that was doubled when Ober, a former president of CBS News, and Girard, a former executive for the Lifetime cable network, joined the channel in November, several months after Scripps took control.

Their mandate was to quickly broaden the appeal of the channel, which, on any given night in prime time draws an average audience of 130,000 households, behind about 30 of its cable competitors and just ahead of Country Music Television.

Although a Houston cable system owned by Time Warner dropped the channel late last year, the Food Network has grown steadily in recent years to reach the current 38.6 million households, a figure that will surpass 40 million by the end of the year. Within the homes that are able to receive it, however, the percentage of viewers it draws has remained steady year to year.

Within the food community, a seemingly built-in audience for its programs, the channel has inspired heated debate, which is not likely to be quelled by the new schedule, with its heavy dose of entertainment shows.

In prime time, Lagasse’s “Emeril Live” will continue to air every weeknight, moving from 9 to 8, and will repeat at 11 p.m. Some of the new shows will air in rotation at 9, along with current staples such as “Two Fat Ladies,” featuring two Englishwomen who revel in traditional cuisine, often laden with heavy ingredients. For more serious cooks, Sara Moulton, who does a live call-in cooking show at 7 p.m., will do a second live show at 10 p.m., with more of an emphasis on how to entertain. (The majority of the network’s current shows--including “Tamales World Tour,” featuring L.A. chefs Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger--will remain on the schedule, though not all of them will have new episodes.)

Julia Child, the reigning master chef of televised cooking shows, says she understands that the channel has to “add more entertainment to get more viewers, more and more Emeril-type things,” but it’s not necessarily for her. “I had great hopes at the beginning [for the channel],” she says, “but I think if you want to have serious cooking, you have to do it for PBS, which is too bad.” Child says she is “very fond” of Lagasse and has had him on her own PBS show, but as for the channel, “every time I turn it on, it seems to be Emeril, and once in a while, Sara [Moulton, of whom she is a fan]. I don’t find myself compelled to look at it.”

Still, she says she appreciates the fact that food has become a more respectable profession, as evidenced by the channel. That growing popularity is partly due to the Food Network, says Geof Drummond, president of A La Carte Communications, which has produced, among other things, Child’s recent PBS shows.

“Julia began this outreach missionary effort 30-something years ago, and that generation that watched her is now Emeril’s,” he says. “I don’t watch the Food Network all that much--some of the programming is inventive, some derivative--but the level of production is getting better and there’s a kind of growing intelligence being put into programming, as well.”

Drummond says he frequently finds himself defending Lagasse to foodies, many of whom have criticized Lagasse’s recipes for being imprecise. But Drummond says he thinks Lagasse is “a good entertainer who comes from a good base of cooking. What he’s doing doesn’t necessarily match up to the haute cuisine that some people would like him to be doing . . . but he has a genuine interest in food and cooking that people relate to.”

The Food Network’s Ober says he thinks his network can appeal to both serious food people and more casual viewers alike, and he hints at some shows for more serious cooks that are coming down the road.

But he insists that the prime-time schedule, in particular, must have more entertainment. “Programming by its nature is built to appeal to as wide an audience as possible,” he says. “But we won’t lose our respect for food.”