I can't stop thinking about food and television (issue 31)
And now I'm hungry.
I've been consumed, as of late, by the precarity of our future and how that plays into making career and life decisions. I oscillate back and forth between wanting the comfort of a regular office job and pursuing a creative field or academia. In other words, a therapy session is desperately needed. The sense of grounding regularity I have in between all of this is, of course, television. The comfort of watching characters experience the full range of the human experience, beyond the confines of what I could ever imagine for myself. Getting absorbed into the lull of their routines.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how food is a sort of inconvenient but mandatory element of any series. Food stylists of a production are usually in charge of sourcing, preparing, and presenting food for the screen. There are a bunch of practicalities that come with on-screen food: ice cream that melts too fast, avoiding anything that might get stuck in an actor's teeth or that might smell too pungent in close proximity, ensuring time period accuracy. There seems to be a lot of creativity involved, too:
[Chris] Oliver also has to make items that you don’t really want to put in your mouth. While filming the TV show Big Little Lies, she made green-colored vomit for actress Reese Witherspoon of cucumbers and parsley. She says it was tasty, like green gazpacho. (x)
Or, if Hannibal hasn't come to mind already, finding the balance between a meal's artful and disturbing presentation:
Janice Poon, the food stylist behind the cannibal-centric TV show Hannibal, had a more challenging obstacle: how to make dishes that resembled human flesh. She refused to do research on cannibalism websites, she told HopesAndFears.com, but she studied a lot of anatomy books. “I’m just like Dr. Frankenstein,” Poon said. “I’m always stitching things, exchanging, putting one kind of meat on a different bone, patching stuff together. ... The key is to let the viewer’s imagination do more of your work.” She transformed veal shanks into human legs, and used prosciutto slices to mimic slivers of a human arm. (x)
While on a film we might join characters for a handful of meals, on television we might join them for dozens, even hundreds. Like most repetitive elements of a show, we come to rely on its intimacies. What is Gilmore Girls without Friday night dinners? Or Sex and the City without cosmopolitans? Succession without a tense, whole-family meeting around the table? The regularity of seeing characters come together over food and drinks builds a special kind of intimacy. Whatever draws you into a show’s universe is part of what makes television so damn comforting—part of the reason why folks watched television more than ever during the pandemic.
At some point in the early pandemic, ten thousand years ago, my mind only gave me the capacity for two actions: watching television and cooking. I began my now-cemented weekly meal prep ritual: marathoning through three to four Minimalist Baker recipes while binging through episodes of television that only require a half-focused gazed. I arrange my laptop in a corner of the kitchen visible at all angles and put on my noise-cancelling headphones. My cooking shows have been everything from ER to Being Erica, Loki to Modern Love. I make soups and massage heads of kale and blend various nutty dressings. Finally, meals made, I sit down to eat—this time with an episode that requires my full focus.
Every Saturday night since the pandemic began, my parents invite me over for homemade pizza, a zesty salad, dark beer and an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. In the Star Trek mess halls, characters will utter a few words to a ‘replicator’ (“coffee, black”) and molecules will spontaneously create whatever food is on their mind. The mechanics of Trek technology have always intentionally vague (dilithium! or something), but I remember growing up wishing I had my own replicator.
On Teletubbies, the only scenes I really remember from the show are the tubby custard machines, sweet gooey goodness pouring out at the press of a giant button. My theory is that food on television is memorable because it appeals to more than one of your senses. We can’t taste what we see, but sometimes it feels like we almost can.
On Servant, I swear I’ve tasted the red wine Sean Turner swishes around his glass every episode. My favourite M. Night Shyamalan Apple TV+ recommendation follows the stay-at-home consulting chef as he makes a different odd-ball meal in each episode, serving as the episode’s primary metaphorical device. Servant is haunting and creepy, a show that leaves you with more questions than answers. Is it a ghost, a religious cult, a possession?
The first season in particular leaves its horror in subtext. The most vivid way to understand the show and its characters is through the food—Sean skinning an eel alive, cooking rabbit three ways, lacing a lavish dessert tower with placenta after his child’s birth for a household of guests, or selling brick-oven pizza in an attempt to infiltrate a cultist’s home (it’s a long story).
On Please Like Me, food is an elaborate affair made between friends. In The Walking Dead universe, characters are either trying to find food or avoid being food. On Sex and the City, the girls meet for lunch breaks and cocktail hour, and try to bribe a hostess to get into the hot new restaurant in town. Miranda pours dish soap on her Betty Crocker cake so she won’t eat it out of the garbage.
On Showtime’s brilliant dramedy Back to Life, characters are constantly running into each other at the only grocery store in a small British seaside town. Miri, after 18 years in prison, tries to re-adjust to life by taking a job as a grocery clerk. Her parole officer also calls her while grocery shopping, chomping on a bag of chips and talking about “newdles.”
On Gilmore Girls, the girls never stop eating. Like the episode where they had to eat four Thanksgiving dinners in one day, probably topped off with a donut from Luke’s Diner. If you look closely, though, they often push food around the plates at Emily’s house to avoid eating on screen, and famously use spit buckets during their junk food binges due to the repetitive takes during production.
There are shows actually about food, of course: Netflix’s High on the Hog, high up on my list of shows to watch, looks at “The canon of recipes and foodways emerging from Southern culture, shaped by centuries of agricultural and culinary labor by African people and their descendants, is the foundation of American cooking.” We have the Food Network, food competition shows, shows about celebrities trying to make food. The chefs on Selena and Chef convince Selena Gomez to make very complicated multi-course meals that I wouldn't even bother making at home.
The most disturbing shows are the ones where no one eats. These shows can feel so sterile, absent of meaning and texture. Luckily I don’t watch any, do you?
Small bites:
— Welcome to my newsletter, now on Substack! I sent the newsletter to all subscribers this month, but going forward you’ll have to be a paying subscriber to read these.
— My thoughts on Squid Game, Foundation, Midnight Mass, and other new shows will be compiled in my monthly ‘new shows countdown’, out on the 15th of each month (for paying subscribers).
— Today is the first inaugural National Day for Truth and Reconciliation here in Canada. From a TV perspective, consider supporting and getting to know Indigenous-led projects like FX’s Reservation Dogs on Hulu.
— Maid, a Netflix show starring Margaret Qualley that probably has a lot to say about class, is out on Friday. It was filmed on the island I live on (Vancouver Island) so I’m particularly excited to see how they make use of the sights. It is receiving rave reviews from critics.
— I finished the new explosive season of Netflix’s Sex Education last night, a delicious binge. I almost tried to rush to re-write this newsletter about the brilliant costume design on that show. Someone needs to debrief that poop scene with me.
— Ted Lasso, The Crown, and Mare of Easttown each swept up most of the Emmys this year. I’ve been inspired to release my own custom nominations ballot via this newsletter. I’ll compile them at the end of the year, and they will be much better than the Emmys.