re: Man vs Food and the downfall of TFN

TFN pulled a MTV on us.

I used to like watching Chopped but there’s only so many times you can watch contestants make something from squid, arugula and jelly beans then have the judges critiquing it like they’re judging the most expensive entree at a 5 star restaurant.

Diners, Drive-ins and Dives never gets old.

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Tournament of Champions

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That one is pretty good..it's like half Top Chef alums now.

Beat Bobby Flay isn't bad either.

If you have the Cooking Channel you can catch old Bourdain episodes every Tuesday night.

I think it's just the nature of cable

Contrast that with something like Chef's Table, which is the product of directly selling content rather than "what's the minimum we can do to get enough viewership to run between ads"

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me too. I know for the longest time there was no way to watch the complete series other than on airtime. Is it squirrelled away on some service now a days?

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I'm pretty sure my daughter was watching episodes on the Food Network Roku app fairly recently. Not sure if it was the whole library, but the Dracula garlic episode was on there along with some others from the old kitchen set he used.

I watch Beat Bobby Flay and DDD, but not much else. I used to love Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, but perhaps was on The Travel Channel, can't remember.

All these channels devolve into shite. Anyone remember when Bravo would show symphonies, opera, ballet, etc.?

Remember when TLC actually had "learning" as a theme?

Everything is drifting towards "Ow, My Balls!"

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all they have are the lame contests.

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Netflix had success with co tests like The Great British Bake-Off and Nailed It!. Plus, TFN had previous hit contest shows prior to streaming taking off with Iron Chef America and Chopped. But those were actual professional chefs competing at a high level. Not your average person who enjoys cooking as a hobby. Or in the case if shows like Nailed It!, just to laugh at professional food industry people challenging hobby chefs and bakers to do really challenging professional techniques and presenting the competition to the viewer to basically laugh at the competitors.

But TFN saw the success of those streaming shows and remembered how well their previous contest shows were and went all in on contests. It does kinda suck.

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Semi-homemade

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Surely you are joking here.

I remember watching an episode of this show. The task was how to make an apple cannoli. The solution was, buy an apple pie and stuff the filling in some cannoli shells.
Are you kidding me with this?

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I saw an ad the other day where PBS's America's Test Kitchen is launching a contest format. Sad.

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