Celebrities fumble in the kitchen in search of TV audience

Dressed in a black tube, lace gloves, pearl necklace and mask with Swarovski crystals, Paris Hilton goes shopping at a local market to secure her dinner ingredients.

He orders four filet mignons from the butcher, takes the opportunity to buy two small acorns of black truffles from Italy and some edible gold leaves to make dinner more “glamorous, of course”, as he says.

Your guests that night will be your mother and sister, who, in addition to sitting down to eat, arrived a little early to help the girl in the kitchen.

Seeing the gold leaf on the workbench, the sister asks, “How does that taste?” Hilton responds, “Money!”

The show, which shows the shenanigans of the famous in the kitchen, “Cooking with Paris”, released last August by Netflix, focuses on the anecdotal and extravagant practices adopted by the socialite when cooking for famous guests such as Kim Kardashian or singer Demi Lovato.

Clearly, the mother who is used to magazine covers is not very familiar with cuts (she uses a butter knife to chop parsley), pans and, let’s be honest, hygiene concerns.

During the preparation, after a few hours to choose the look, she wears a blouse with feathers on the sleeves, mixing with her hand butter with the grated black truffles. Or decides it’s best to wash the meat under the tap before grilling it.

“I love to cook, but I’m not a trained chef and I don’t intend to be”, she says, right at the opening of the program. “I want to show that any bitch can cook too.”

Hilton’s motto, in fact, is a recent (and growing) trend in new food shows, especially on streaming platforms and YouTube channels.

The most skilled professionals leave the scene and the celebrities who mess up the recipes, miss the points and star in disasters common to any amateur cook.

From Selena Gomez to Sandy, from Amy Schumer to Adriane Galisteu, contemporary shows deepen a movement that had already begun on closed channels, in which actors and celebrities appear not only in soap operas and talk shows, but putting their hands dirty.

“Cooking on TV has reached a saturation point”, analyzes Folha TV critic Tony Goes. For him, the old revenue programs that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s gave way to new formats, such as the boom in competitive realities, for example.

Although there are still programs that teach techniques, he believes the focus is now on entertainment itself. “People watch it not to learn how to make this or that dish, but to have fun. It’s entertainment first, second and third.”

In her program, Sandy receives professional help from famous cooks (such as Paola Carosella and Thiago Castanho) to cook at her home, with the presence of her family.

Drops the egg on the floor, chip the nail polish with the knife and rehearse a “galopeeeeeeira” at the top of your lungs as you pour a dough onto the baking sheet.

“It’s been a wonderful, fun experience,” says the singer in the show’s teaser. “I really get very focused, and the people here at home say that I’m doing well”, he is proud.

Gastronomy has become, in recent years, a way for many celebrities to amplify their images, associating them with a different area than the one in which they originally excelled.

Many also took a ride on the visibility that gastronomy has gained in current pop culture to “get out of the fridge” and take advantage of the visibility that can even generate new commercial opportunities.

“In the hyper-connected world we live in, almost any exposure is valid,” explains Goes. Participating in a food show can generate more engagement on social media, and so on.

Actor Stanley Tucci, known for roles in films like “The Devil Wears Prada” and “A Look from Heaven” (for which he was nominated for an Oscar), became a trending topic on Twitter when his food show premiered on CNN (“Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy”), in which he travels through Italy to eat and talk about his passion for food.

The repercussion was such that he has just released a book on the subject and has become a regular on American television talk shows.

“Food has this enormous power of engagement,” he said on the show hosted by James Corden.

In many new formats, by the way, food has become just a pretext, since ingredients or recipe steps are almost no longer shown.

In the new GNT program, “Bem Juntinhos”, the couple Fernanda Lima and Rodrigo Hilbert receive artists: she interviews them while he cooks.

During the approximately 30 minutes of duration, no board is built and not even a cooking tip is shared: food, really, only in short secondary takes between chats with Dani Calabresa or Gaby Amarantos.

The same formula follows “Hessel’s Kitchen”, a culinary show launched on YouTube by the geek content platform Omelete.

There, the presenter and founder of the site, Marcelo Hessel, also cooks while talking to his guests about subjects such as mysticism or relationships.

For him, the way people consume audiovisual content has changed a lot, as live broadcasts and communities like Twitch have become the new social network, generating other forms of interaction.

“The kind of professorial video that I’ve always done as a film critic has given way to informal chats and an approximation that puts the streamer and the audience on the same level, almost an intimacy”, he opines.

In the pandemic, Hessel started to cook more and more and post his preparations on social media, which generated an interesting engagement with his followers that made him think that it could be good for a new program format.

“It’s very common that people even give tips on how to improve what I’m preparing, so the show was born less from a place of authority and more to test if this approximation between lay people, myself on one side and the viewer on the other”, says.

In the end, he says, the most important ingredients are the guests, ranging from psychoanalyst Christian Dunker, former BBB João Pedrosa, to writer Natália Timerman, who “agreed to participate without even knowing what I was going to cook or how.”

“I cook with measurements in my eye, each carbonara I make is different. The program is not intended to be a place of authority [na cozinha]”, he emphasizes.

As critic Tony Goes summarizes, the new food shows are about entertaining, not teaching. “Anyone who wants to learn to cook should buy a book or take a course”, he concludes.