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How Guy Fieri Destroyed the Food Network


Bart

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How can this writer just blame one guy? The demise of Food Network should fall on the multiple chefs they chose as headliner personalities and spokespeople of the network and its ratings. I couldn't stomach to read the article in detail, having not finding his arguments sound, but found it particularly interesting the writer noted he is OCD in his brief author bio....

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Maybe I've been watching too many Night Gallerys and Twilight Zones, but haven't we had this discussion fairly recently?

Yes. Recycled Salon article by the same author (originally from August). You posted it here.

These attacks on Fieri go to show that his shtick is as much a cash cow for critics as it is for Food Network and himself.  A little of him goes a long way, but I don't mind watching some of the stuff. I actually find Triple D somewhat soothing to watch, odd as that might sound. It's when he's on every time I turn on the channel that it gets annoying.  I agree with the point Goodeats alluded to:  his ubiquity is a symptom of Food Network's ills, not the cause of them.

ETA:  It's not so much recycled as someone at Salon made an effort to have it pop back up on the front page among the suggested/most popular articles again, even though it's four months old.  The article linked in this thread has the August date on it.  I hate it when sites do that.

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I like Fieri in small doses, and enjoy DDD.  To my mind, FN's troubles began when they got away from the Alton Brown kind of instructional cooking programs and started featuring Chefs that showed you how they cook, but didn't offer much in the way of teaching.  Plus all the competitive shows get repetitive and not very entertaining.  I will resort to Ina Garten's recipes on occasion because she has figured out ways to reduce the work involved in producing a nice meal for entertainment purposes.  And I still love Giada!

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I have to agree with some of the folks here, Guy didn't destroy the Food Network, it was the way the Food Network got away from what made it good in the first place.  Too many competitions, too few teaching shows.  And of course it was cable networks like The Food Network that killed some of PBS' shows like the Great Chefs of series.

Regardless of his other unsavory behavior, chefs like Jeff Smith at least taught you about cooking and how to do it.  Most of the shows today could be sporting events for the non sporting crowd.

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Complaining about the lack of cooking on Food Network is like complaining about the lack of music videos on MTV*.  The network brass have a need to always increase ratings, and the sameness that traditional programming brought to the numbers makes it inevitable that they lower the bar for the sake of eyeballs.  Hell, "The Cooking Channel" is basically MTV2.

*see also TLC, A&E, AMC, VH1, Weather Channel, Headline News, etc etc

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