Emeril Live
Bam! For a decade, Emeril Lagasse cooked in front of a cheering studio audience and a live band, and Food Network had a household name. Emeril Live ran on the network from October 1997 to December 2007, 1,653 episodes of garlic, pork fat, and a catchphrase that got applause every single time.
Lagasse was in Food Network's original 1993 lineup, hosting Essence of Emeril, and had been the first host of How to Boil Water. In 1996 the network's CEO, Erica Gruen, created Emeril Live, the show that became the network's signature series. Production began in early 1997 and it premiered on October 6, 1997, with what Allen Salkin's history of the network called a genre-bending formula: a live audience in bleachers, a house band, and a chef who worked the crowd like a talk-show host, sometimes sitting in on drums during commercial breaks, a skill left over from his high-school drum team. It won a Cable ACE Award for Best Informational Show in its first year.
The catchphrases did the rest. "Bam!" started as a way to keep his studio crew awake and alert, and "kick it up a notch," "pork fat rules," and "feel the love" followed. Fans lined up week after week to fill the bleachers, and the audience cheered whenever he announced he was adding more "gah-lic." Around 2000 the show aired every weeknight at 8 p.m., and NBC tried a sitcom: Emeril, with Lagasse playing a version of himself, aired in the fall of 2001 and was canceled before the season was out. The show traveled, too; in September 2003 it taped at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey with a KC-10 tanker as the backdrop.
By the mid-2000s the audience was aging and the network's newer shows, Good Eats, Iron Chef America, and The Next Food Network Star, were drawing younger viewers. Bobby Flay's Throwdown was beating Emeril Live in the ratings, and the network was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a week on a show when its typical series cost about $40,000 an episode. A new studio, a Viking range, and a cut monologue did not fix it. Food Network announced on November 27, 2007, that production would end, and the last episode aired December 11. Fine Living picked up the show in July 2008, including never-before-seen episodes, and it ran there and on Cooking Channel until December 14, 2010. In February 2008 Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia bought the Emeril brand, cookware, cookbooks, and TV rights included, in a $50 million deal; he kept the restaurants.
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