A trio of streaming picks for your weekend viewing, paired with this week's biggest food TV headlines.
This piece originally ran on December 15, 2017, inside "Eat, Drink, Watch" — the weekly dispatch for anyone who'd rather order takeout and curl up in front of the television. Browse the back catalog or sign up here.
It's been a wild ride across the food media landscape these past seven days. I've got the full recap of the major TV headlines coming up, but first, here is one series you should absolutely queue up, plus a couple of additional streaming suggestions:
Miriam heads downtown
Amy Sherman-Palladino has rolled out a fresh series that, much like her earlier triumph, orbits around a coffee shop. Yet where Gilmore Girls anchored its hangout at Luke's, a made-up northeastern diner, this program is built around a genuine New York landmark of near-mythic reputation: the Gaslight Cafe. That is where Miriam Maisel, an immaculate late-1950s housewife from the Upper West Side, lands one evening after her husband delivers devastating personal news. Rather than grabbing a seat to listen to folk acts or beat poets, Miriam climbs onto the stage and kicks off her improbable run as a stand-up comic.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel splits the difference between a family-centered drama and a showbiz romp. With its vivid production palette and bold, larger-than-life characters, the entire production carries the flavor of a Broadway transfer. Mercifully, even the more outlandish beats are held together by the strength of the acting.
What I love most about this series, beyond Rachel Brosnahan's turn in the lead, is how Sherman-Palladino and her team have rebuilt legendary Greenwich Village beatnik venues like the Gaslight and the Kettle of Fish bar. It offers a broader portrait of midcentury Manhattan than Mad Men, television's prior go-to for New York nostalgia. And, as with Sherman-Palladino's earlier success, food surfaces constantly wherever these people roam. Across the show's eight installments, the Maisel home fills with dinner scenes, and early on Miriam even leverages her brisket as a bargaining chip.
Anyone partial to Gilmore Girls should absolutely queue this up, as should viewers curious about the Village coffeehouse circuit that nurtured Lenny Bruce, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. All eight Season 1 episodes are streaming on Amazon Prime right now.
Today's streaming lineup
PBS/Great British Baking Show
Streaming now: The Great British Baking Show Season 5 Masterclass: ChristmasFind it on: PBS.orgThe breakdown: If you're craving fresh baking inspiration, or simply want another dose of that Baking Show warmth to carry you through the year's gloomiest stretch, PBS is now streaming this holiday installment featuring judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood. The hour-long special walks viewers through techniques for panettone, mince pies, Christmas pudding, and winter cakes, sprinkled with the trademark banter and seasonal stories from Berry and Hollywood, who are captured inside a frosty manor house somewhere in the English countryside.
Streaming now: PizzaioloFind it on: Facebook, New Yorker VideoThe breakdown: Dom DeMarco has spent the past 52 years turning out pies at his modest Di Fara outpost in Midwood, Brooklyn. The pizza is excellent — the finest in NYC by some accounts — but a sizable slice of the Di Fara appeal comes from observing DeMarco execute the ritual he's honed over a lifetime. There is the cheese scatter. The pizza pull. The basil snip. The olive oil pour. And this compact short film from the New Yorker documents every gesture in striking detail.
More entertainment headlines…
- As you've probably caught by now, four women came forward this week with sexual misconduct allegations against Mario Batali, and ABC subsequently asked him to step away from his daytime program The Chew while the network investigates the claims. The remaining three co-hosts — Carla Hall, Clinton Kelly, and Michael Simon — addressed his exit on Tuesday's broadcast. Then on Thursday evening, the network revealed it had severed ties with Mario entirely. Nobody wants to be associated with Batali any longer.
- Meanwhile, ABC has pulled the remaining episodes of The Great American Baking Show, which debuted last Friday, after co-host Johnny Iuzzini faced sexual misconduct allegations from multiple former employees. This is the proper call, though given that the accusations against Iuzzini surfaced last month, I'd argue that ABC yanked the show a week too late — it should never have made it on air to begin with.
- Morgan Spurlock, the filmmaker and face of Super Size Me, confessed this week to having been accused of raping a classmate in college and of harassing an assistant at his production outfit eight years back. Spurlock's Super Size Me follow-up was recently picked up by YouTube Red, though the company hasn't set a release date. On Thursday night, Spurlock revealed he was stepping down from his post at Warrior Poets, the production house he co-founded 13 years ago.
- And in additional culinary offender developments, disgraced New Orleans chef/restaurateur John Besh got scrubbed from the new season of Top Chef this week. Bravo deserves credit for making this call. An unfortunate remark about harassment slipped into the season premiere, but judge Tom Colicchio told me it was cut for re-airings. I hope the production teams behind these shows continue weighing the recent wave of sexual misconduct reports as they assemble the season's narratives and soundbites.
- On a brighter note, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Portlandia are both returning in early 2018. This will mark Portlandia's final season, and Queer Eye's debut with its refreshed Netflix cast. The new food specialist is a relative unknown named Antoni Porowski, who was reportedly hand-selected by the original Fab 5 culinary authority, Ted Allen.
And a quick note on Bourdain: Following the Batali headlines and the sexual misconduct claims lodged against Spotted Pig owner Ken Friedman, Anthony Bourdain published a Medium post titled "Reacting to Bad News." Bourdain, who recently produced a documentary featuring both men as on-camera voices, writes: "Any admiration I have expressed in the past for Mario Batali and Ken Friedman, whatever I might feel about them, however much I admired and respected them, is, in light of these charges, irrelevant."
I respect that Bourdain is leveraging his platform to discuss toxic masculinity across the restaurant world, but I'd also like to see him devote some of his airtime or production muscle to actually tackling the subject. Maybe he could produce a film about sexual harassment in restaurant kitchens, exploring how to build a healthier work environment? Or perhaps he could dedicate a few Parts Unknown episodes to the topic, or at minimum feature more women and fewer of his cool-dude chef buddies? Discussing the problem matters, but shifting how kitchen culture gets portrayed on film and TV will take more than just Medium essays, interview soundbites, and tweet storms.
My biggest hope for 2018 is that every showrunner and producer working in food television keeps this in mind as they book guests, write scripts, and greenlight projects in the new year.
Order yourself something delicious this weekend — you've earned it,
— Greg Morabito
Note: The email edition of this newsletter included a recommendation for A Very Murray Christmas, which we pulled after a reader flagged that actor Bill Murray himself has faced accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse.
