Good Eats

Alton Brown came to cooking from behind a camera. He had studied film at the University of Georgia and spent the 1980s shooting music videos, including R.E.M.'s "The One I Love," before deciding in the 1990s that American cooking shows were bad enough that he should make his own. He enrolled at the New England Culinary Institute, graduated in 1997, and taught himself the science he had ignored in school so he could explain what was actually happening in the pan. Two pilots, "Steak Your Claim" and "This Spud's for You," aired on Chicago's PBS station WTTW in July 1998; a Food Network executive saw a clip on the Eastman Kodak website, where it was showcasing a new film stock, and the network picked the show up in July 1999.

In the tenth-anniversary episode Brown said the idea was to combine Julia Child, Mr. Wizard and Monty Python, and the show looked like nothing else on the channel: Dutch angles, cameras mounted inside ovens, refrigerators and microwaves, Brown playing a cowboy to make chili or a Father Merrin figure in an Exorcist parody to get a child to eat peas, and a company of recurring characters — his sister Marsha, neighbor Chuck, Uncle Colonel Bob Boatwright, the food agent Sid, the Dungeon Master — whose origins he later revealed in a backstage episode. Each half-hour took a single ingredient or technique and explained it with makeshift teaching aids, and Brown made a running crusade of the "unitasker," declaring the fire extinguisher the only unitasker in the kitchen and building gadgets from hardware-store parts to prove the point. The kitchen itself was a prop: the first four seasons shot in a partner's real Atlanta-area home, the fifth and sixth in the line producer's new house, and from the seventh in an exact replica of that house built on a sound stage after the neighbors complained.

The show earned a James Beard nomination for food journalism in 2000 and a Peabody in 2006, whose citation read, "Rarely has science been taught on TV in such an entertaining — and appetizing — manner," and Brown won the James Beard Award for best TV food personality in 2011. That May he announced on Twitter that he was retiring the show after 249 episodes plus three one-hour specials. The final episode aired on February 10, 2012; he did not sign off with his usual "see you next time on Good Eats," saying instead "Stay dark, America" and snapping his fingers as the screen went black. Brown revisited the catalog as Good Eats: Reloaded on Cooking Channel in 2018 and revived it outright as Good Eats: The Return on Food Network in 2019, running two seasons before announcing in 2021 that there would not be a third.