HRN Community Sessions
History of the Food Network with Matthew Stillman
On a special feature, Erin Fairbanks sits down with former Food Network programming executive, Matthew Stillman. Matthew recounts working as a programming developer for the network in its early days in the late 1990's and discusses how different things were back then. The food media landscape has certainly changed, but there were signs that this explosion of gastronomic content was on the horizon. Get an inside perspective on the original programming and the culture of "dump & stir" that preceded cooking competitions and reality shows. Find out how Matthew brought Iron Chef to America in 1998 and how it changed the game for food TV.
"One of the things I loved most about Good Eats is it assumed the audiences were smart and interested, while the dump & stir shows assumed you knew nothing." [33:15]
--Matthew Stillman on HeritageRadioNetwork.org