Cooking shows
On broadcast are pretty good too, I love the old Julia Child reruns and Jacques Pepin is awesome.
But I gotta tell you..
Christina Pirello is a pustule on cooking in general. Hey, I don’t care if you buy into that whole macrobiotic whole vegan food bullshit, some people also think Obama is a good president. I watch as this horsefaced old cur with no waist and no ass, like a middle aged manin a bowling alley, only lacking the monogrammed pinstriped shirt, and i think to myself, if this is what you get from being a vegan, count me out. And the skeletal, sickly sycophants in the audience oohing and aahing at each faux cheese recipe or catshit looking garden burger fried in hemp oil (I’m not making that up) it makes me want to hurl. If I live fifteen fewer years than any of them, I will consider myself to have lived twenty years better. Who gives this freak a TV show? Especially knowing that (As she says herself) she became a vegetarian just to piss off her father the butcher. Sorry, honey, the “Stick it to daddy” tantrum has outasted it’s cuteness.
I guess public television has to cater to it’s base.
19 comments Og | Uncategorized
I used to love PBS back when it was real. Before This Old House turned into an Extreme Home Makeover like mess. When they had Martin Yan and Jaques Pepin and Julia Child. Sadly those days are long gone.
My daughter and I have watched Sesame Street, but when we do so, it is a repeat on Netflix. Every time I get interested in a show on PBS, a couple of weeks in, it is pledge month again.
Saturday morning PBS cooking shows used to be a morning tradition for us. Whatever house project started after noon or so when they were finished up.
That’s dropped off the last few years. Partly us, partly the new programming schedule and shows. Joanne Weir drives us crazy.
We used to be sustaining members of the area affiliate. But since we don’t really watch PBS anymore we’re not anymore.
Eat right, live healthy, die anyway.
Life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease. Might as well enjoy yourself while you can.
It is a crock. They fleece the public with taxes and then they have the unmitigated gall to have pledge drives. Those are some how superior to those crass advertisments.
For drivel that cannot get air time in the profit driven capitalist big media.
That should tell you all you need to know right there.
“If Yan can cook, so can you!” used to love that show that guy was a wizard with a knife.
PBS changed the world in a good way. Would there be a cable channel like CNBC if Wall Street Week hadn’t done business news first? Would their be other educational programs for kids without Sesame Street? Would there be Food TV if there was no Julia Child? These other channels might have been created, but I’m betting that there are a bunch of cable channels created by people who watched the classic shows on PBS and grew up to say, wow there should be a whole cable channel of shows they saw on PBS. Sadly it appears that the types of shows I used to watch on PBS are no longer on PBS, having been replaced by New Age Liberal organic fertilizer.
Dave: it’s all been new age liberal fertilizer since day one. It was just disguised with occasional decent programming. And like Apple Computers it was sold as lifestyle/religion, which has always been my objection.
A large part of the public broadcasting offerings (at least weekdays and during the day) are devoted to educational shows that are designed for preschoolers and schoolchildren.
I’ve also seen shows on my local PBS channels in the dead of night that were obviously designed to be taped and shown in the classroom later on.
My local stations also offer programming on subjects like GED study, which I believe is a worthwhile public service.
This is, to my way of thinking, an appropriate thing for public broadcasting to be doing and a fair use of tax dollars.
FTR tax revenues cover just a small portion of public tv and radio across the country; the overwhelming majority of these budgets must be made through donations. And hence pledge drives and those damn totebags.
I also appreciate shows like “American Experience,” and “History Detectives,” both of which I have become addicted to. Shows like “Nature” and Nova” and “Frontline” define short-form documentary and that’s something PBS does better than anyone else, as these days Discovery and Smithsonian and National Geographic and History Channels are reality shows and sensationalistic hyped-up crap.
PBS is also my outlet for opera and classical music. I would not otherwise get to see performances from the Met and I would miss a lot of really good music on the radio side of things, some of them from the great symphonies from around the country.
Oh, and “American Masters.” Where I got to see nearly two full hours of Johnny Carson and it was so good. Check it out for yourself.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/johnny-carson-king-of-late-night/watch-the-full-documentary/2093/
“Julia and Jacques” also runs here. I loved it the first time and I really love it now. Two old and dear friends sharing wine and food; what could be better?
Jenny
Oh dear, I seem to have cut myself.
roflmao.
I recall my Mom watching The Frugal Gourmet and Yan Can Cook. If you don’t mind a mention of cable TV cooking shows though, Nigella can cook for me ANYTIME.
Indeed! I loves me some nigella.
Nigella apparently has two live puppies in her shirt at all times. Extremely active, naughty, naughty, naughty … … … puppies.
Speckled puppies.
Nigella Nutella?
Nigella has cooking on her show? Who knew? I love her sweater puppies. And from her attitude, so does she.
Gerry N.
I remember being on the road a few years ago watching PBS in the afternoon and seeing Justin Wilson do his schtick.
I changed channels and caught another PBS channel showing another Justin Wilson show obviously filmed twenty years earlier.
And he was telling the same jokes and cooking the same food!
Ga ron teed!
Mmmmmm, Nigella…
Mmmmm, Giada. Also featuring sweater puppies.
Dave asked: ” Would there be a cable channel like CNBC if Wall Street Week hadn’t done business news first? Would their be other educational programs for kids without Sesame Street? Would there be Food TV if there was no Julia Child?”
Yes, because financial types want that content and will pay for it.
Yes, because parents will buy stuff advertised on education programming, and thus pay for it – and they want the educational programming it supports. [Regardlesss of how educational it actually is; that they think it’s helping their precious child is sufficient.]
Yes, because people like cooking shows and will pay for them the same way as above.
The idea that nobody would have come up with the idea of making cooking, education, and business content “unless PBS did it first” is baffling … because it’s the same idea process as “some guy coming up with the idea for the show on PBS”.
(Which is my main problem with PBS, apart from what Og said about it being lifestyle posturing: half of it is “the same stuff commercial media provides, but on the public dime and with fundraising”.
The other half is things like Jenny’s opera and classical: lifestyle subsidy for the middle class, supporting things that are far too unpopular to support themselves on their own merits, on the public dollar.
But that leads into my rant about public support for “the arts”*, and especially Portland’s ridiculous new “Arts Tax”, but I digress…
* If it needs “support” it shouldn’t get any.)