The Lost Era of Middlebrow Television
When local broadcast mattered.
In Splice Today, editor-in-chief Russ Smith wrote an appreciation of television cop shows. Police procedurals that got The Middlebrow thinking about television just as he and The Scholar Wife got into Julia, the HBO series about the rise of television chef Julia Child, who pioneered the cooking show genre that led to whatever the heck The Food Network is in 2022.
As biography, The Middlebrow hears that Julia has some faults. But what really stuck out in the first few episodes is how her show originated as the creation of the Public Broadcasting Service affiliate in Boston. Julia’s early success was prompted by dozens of letters from local viewers wanting to see more and a local station director’s decision to meet that demand. This was American media pre-consolidation, a potentially more creative time.
The French Chef debuted in 1963 and ran for 10 years on Boston’s WGBH, which produced the show with financial help from its host and her backers. So, Child grew into a national celebrity from a local market. Her show got a chance because it served a local audience and serving that audience would have been enough to sustain it, even if the worldwide acclaim had never materialized.
One of the things stressed in the early episodes of Julia was the Middlebrow sensibility of public television in Boston at the time. A literature professor hosted a show called “I’ve Been Reading,” where he set out to popularize the writing of Truman Capote and compilations of Shakespeare’s insults. A proposed show is “Economics for the Layman.” The worry about Julia’s show is that it’s too lowbrow, though it’s made clear that an America subsisting on cafeteria salisbury steak and sad looking tuna casseroles can only have its culture elevated by an introduction to French cooking and wine appreciation. Learning to cook coq a vin is at least as important to life as understanding how the Federal Reserve works.
From her platform at PBS, Julia Child influenced the next generation of televised culinary instruction, including Sara Moulton, who modernized many of Child’s techniques and who helped launch The Food Network in the 1990s. Just like MTV once built its programming on music videos, The Food Network’s programming once focused on lessons and culinary appreciation. It was a spot not just to learn how to cook at home but to learn how to shop for ingredients, how to mix a cocktail, to pair a wine and to enjoy blood red meat even if your parents raised you to fear trichinosis from anything pink in the middle.
In shows like Molto Mario, a young Mario Battali not yet besotted with his own celebrity, taught cooking and Italian culinary history in a friendly and accessible format, bringing real Italian food (as opposed to Italian-American) to American audiences the way Child brought French technique to American kitchens. Now, The Middlebrow loved Iron Chef, the cooking competition that reached the Food Network from Japan around 2000, but this was the Network’s turn from instruction to competitions and stunts. Soon, new hosts weren’t selected because they had something to teach or show but because they had won a talent search meant to mint nationwide celebs. Rather than shows about how to make a meal, we got shows about bad cooks failing for our amusement.
What’s happened to the Food Network seems connected to the shift in American media culture where offerings are made for national and international audiences, rather than locals. The circumstances around Child were not limited to the Boston market or public television. Local for-profit stations, affiliated with the big broadcast networks but owned independently, developed programming with regional viewers in mind.
This is a huge part of the history of professional wrestling in the U.S. Before the WWE took wrestling national in the mid-1980s, most of the entertainment was staged by local promoters around the country who put on live events and television programming in specific markets. These groups shared talents through a network known as the National Wrestling Alliance, which designated certain champions who would travel from market to market to defend their titles, but the businesses were all local. In a market like Memphis during the 1970s and 80s, wrestler Jerry Lawler was a huge celebrity.
In 1982, comedian Andy Kaufman was a national celebrity and a star on the sitcom Taxi. Kaufman brought the Memphis territory, and Lawler, to national attention when he visited the promotion and started a feud with the wrestler that culminated in a brawl in front of David Letterman and a match at the legendary Mid-South Coliseum.
What’s notable is how the feud played out both nationally and in the regional Memphis market – it served Kaufman’s national audience and helped build his reputation as an artist without boundaries while it also sold tickets in Memphis. The more fragmented markets for entertainment in this era created opportunities for performance and producers that don’t exist today.
Wishing won’t make it so, but having fewer national gatekeepers and more opportunities for local success in media and the arts would greatly enhance American culture. It’s why we have Julia Child to look back on so fondly, after all.
Great piece!