Food TV

So it seems to be reruns of Good Eats this week. I DVR pretty much every episode, because I have a sick, SICK fascination with Alton Brown. He is very possibly my favorite F.N. personality. So today I watched every episode I DVR’d this week, and it looks like most of them were from Season One. This is a good thing for me because I never saw the first season.
In the Behind the scenes episode of Good Eats, A.B. explained that the first episodes of Good Eats were actually filmed in a home kitchen. Eventually they had to get an actual soundstage and set, but those first episodes were indeed in somebody’s house. I didn’t think I would ever notice, but watching those first episodes I was struck by two things…

1) Boy does A.B. look young!!! He looks more like his nephew that makes so many appearances these days, than he does himself. Now for the most part, I must say I am a greater fan of his current look, but it was shocking to see how much he has changed in the last few years.
2) The sound quality of that first season is not the greatest. It really was a very amatuer show in the beginning. And I don’t say that in a negative way. Rather I say it in astonishment that it has come as far as it has. With the television industry being what it is, and awesome show’s like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip being canceled in less than 2 seasons, it does my heart good to see that Good Eats has made it as far as it has.

In the Pantry Raid episode we saw A.B. go into a pasta factory and talk to an actual pasta maker. While they were recording the gentleman was tossing instructions to his staff, and the machinery of the factory was nearly overpowering their conversation. And yet it was fascinating. It was the stuff you rarely see anymore. In Let Them Eat Foam, we learned about Angel Food Cake, and I saw how much A.B. has grown as a narrator of his show.

I also saw This Spud’s for You, parts One and Two. Well nobody loves potatoes more than I do, so I loved the different recipe’s and ideas in the shows. But I also really loved the contrast between the two episodes. The first being another from that first season, when the show was … not polished … The second, being one of the most fun, if not strangest stories that I have seen on the show. Along the lines of Stephen King’s Misery, the show followed a bedraggled Alton who found himself in the clutches of his Number One Fan, who happened to be dating a potato farmer. She keeps him captive, making him help her make him meal after meal.

The first season of this show has very few of these mini stories, while somewhere along the line, we got an entire episode that was a story… These days we have a fantastic mixture of the two. Each show has a theme, with several short sketchs, and a lot of time in the kitchen. A cavalcade of strange characters populate the kitchen of Good Eats these days, but we love them all. I think they found a balance that makes the show damn neat perfect. I hope that it shows for many years to come…