Peak TV has wrought Peak Food TV

The Hollywood Reporter

Camera-friendly chefs are as coveted as seasoned showrunners in the Peak Food TV era, from Gordon Ramsay to Padma Lakshmi to David Chang and Samin Nosrat. "We saw that people were responding and reacting to Chef's Table, viscerally, on a global level," says Lisa Nishimura, Netflix vice president independent film and documentary features, who followed that show with five more seasons and similarly polished projects such as David Chang's Ugly Delicious and Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat. "Even though you can't smell or taste this food through the screen, you can absolutely feel it." As Michael O'Connell notes, "in the streaming era, food programming can serve as 'turn it on and leave it on' TV — and variety within the genre is significant. There's prestige documentary (Chef's Table follow-up Street Food), competition (Fox mainstay Hell's Kitchen), hybrids of travel and tutorial (PBS' No Passport Required), shortform (see: two recent food orders from Jeffrey Katzenberg upstart Quibi) and classic cooking shows — or, as they're somewhat snidely referred to within the industry, 'dump-and-stirs' (Food's Trisha's Southern Kitchen with country star Trisha Yearwood)."