Diners, Drive-Ins and Divebombing Expectations for Food TV

I recall an apartment party I attended years ago where I sat on a couch and watched Food Network's "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" late on a Friday evening.  Earlier that night, I had become drunk on heated absinthe, and later had imbibed a liberal amount of the hosts' (expensive) marijuana.  I was eating chips and hot salsa - or maybe it was homemade popcorn - by the handful.  I think maybe I brought some store-bought chocolate chip cookies to this event.  I do make a wonderful house guest, don't I?

With the exception of my wife, I had met everyone around me just a few hours before.  This mattered not at all; spurred by what was on television, I had entered the arena of food hedonism, and was truly in a happy place.  And though I've tried mightily to chase that dragon in the years since, it was the only time in my life I have ever enjoyed watching "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives".

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I am absolutely not against the glamorization of crappy food on TV.  Many people learn to cook healthy food each day by first learning to cook what they like (I certainly progressed that way), and even that aside, crappy food is a wonderful indulgence that everyone should enjoy from time to time.  What some people call "food porn" is a legitimate genre, but it needs to be well executed in order to work. "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" seems to be the opposite of well executed; it is the type of food porn that is filmed in low-rate motels outside Tampa.  You can watch, sure, but it's like watching a train wreck, and you feel really terrible afterward for having watched it.

To me, the show doesn't really focus on cooking.  Nor does it focus on location, or ambiance, or restaurant history, or anything even remotely relevant to the act of deciding to leave your house and go someplace else to eat dinner.  It seems to exist entirely in a narcissistic hell space devoted to host Guy Fieri's misplaced insistence that he is both funny and capable of carrying on a normal human conversation.

But with the possible exception of New York Yankees commentator Michael Kay (who also, somehow, has managed to earn an interview-style show on TV), Fieri is the most socially awkward man on television.  He seems to lack all creative vision and all artistic ingenuity above and beyond that of a sexually frustrated seventh grader.  Whatever fourth wall ever existed between shitty food and banal conversation is destroyed by his mentally challenged attempts at junior varsity jock humor-slash-"banter" with restaurant owners and chefs.  (NOTE: I've spent a few summers working in restaurants, and I know that the back of house is not a place for mature humor or for delicate sensibilities.  But the least interesting person I ever worked with at a suburban Pizza Hut is a more engaging character than Guy Fieri.)  There is no easier joke than a dick joke, and as a result, the dick joke needs to be executed well in order to actually be funny - someone needs to tell this guy that not every joke should be a terrible and sophomoric dick joke.

Somewhere in the kernel of "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" is a show that I would find legitimately interesting.  The show could focus on regions or themes of food, for instance (like Travel Channel's criminally underrated "Adam Richman's Best Sandwich in America", which is hosted by a much funnier and significantly more interesting personality, far more elegant in executing the aforementioned dick joke).  Something of a focus for what a particular restaurant signifiies to a community, or to a type of people within a community, would also improve the show.  To be fair, the show does spend some time profiling the restauranteurs and chefs for each restaurant, but these profiles are shallow and seemingly pointless.  Segments and episodes are not interlinked, even when obvious connections exist.

The star of "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" should be the food, but it does not seem that the food is intended to outshine the host.  Each restaurant has its own flair, and I am convinced that a story could be told about each that is both serious and lighthearted.  But this would have to be left to a more talented host and production team on some other galaxy, because dishes are explained in ways that disrespect the audience, implying strongly that no one watching the show at home would ever want to try to copy them.  When food is tasted, the imbecile host Fieri describes them in a way that you'd sort of have to be both drunk and high in order to understand.  And frankly, I don't believe he even enjoys half of the stuff that he tries.

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There are people out there who love the show (it's been playing for over six years and two hundred episodes), and some of these people would tell you they are pretty damned serious about food.  But they want their high culture food to remain high culture, and their low culture food to remain low culture.  I guess I'm the high-falutin' guy who does not get this; I want even my low culture guilty indulgences to mean something. 

I love the chain burger restaurant Five Guys, for instance.  Their burgers are delicious and the "small" french fries includes an additional metric ton of fried potato slices, scooped indiscriminately into a paper bag.  But I love the place as a business story, as well - Five Guys is a model in devoting resources to high quality ingredients, independent of cost, as well as an owner-centric franchising plan.  Additionally, I love the ritual of going to Five Guys.  You place an order, and you wait.  You wait a damned long time, munch a few peanuts, and read the self-promotional articles on the walls (NOTE: Did you know that Five Guys was Washingtonian Magazine's #1 Best Burger for seven years in a row?!).  Then you finally get your paper bag of junk food and grease, go home, crack open an ice cold beer or six and watch some sporting event, wallowing in your own indulgence.

To that end, Five Guys isn't just food for me, it's an exercise in self-actualization and a part of my own existential being.  It's a big part of who I think I am, it's fucking analysis, and I think it might help explain why I believe "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" is, in contrast, so incredibly stupid.

It's probably because the show would fit better on MTV's slate of crappy reality programs than the Food Network.  The show advocates the absence of thinking, replaced with pure gluttony - eating while only caring superficially about taste and basically just shoving crap down your gullet (and whether some cole slaw happened to drip down someone's face while eating, ahem, giggity).  It is, now that I think of it, probably no coincidence that Triple-D marathons are commonplace on overnight Fridays and Saturdays on Food Network.  It is the Taco Bell of food television; potentially enjoyable in the moment, but not worth the long term repercussions.  It is universally regarded as terrible, and yet some people still unabashedly adore it.  (I'd throw in White Castle as an analogy instead, but White Castle-as-drunk-cuisine kind of rules.)

But can't we all agree that if we all stop watching the show, the network will cancel it?  Can't we all agree, on just this one thing?