Why This Matters: Shows focused around food and family offer viewers a comfy respite from the contentious cultural mood.
Family cooking shows, which see families competing to craft and serve a better dish than the clan across the way, are suddenly hotter than a Viking Professional 5 Series oven. Family Food Showdown started on Food Network March 3, and Dinner Takes All breaks bread on BYUtv beginning March 20. The Big Family Cooking Showdown is on Netflix, and Family Food Fight, hosted by Ayesha Curry, will run on ABC.
Cleve Keller and Dave Noll, whose Keller/Noll created the competing chefs series Chopped on Food Network, created Dinner Takes All, a mix of cooking competition and food trivia. They hope the rookie show captures the best of both family TV and food TV. Our hope is that our show embodies everything that family programming means, said Noll.
Dinner Takes All features two teams of five family members who build their best Sunday dinner, including an entr e, three sides and a dessert. Family members are also quizzed on their knowledge of food. Winning families get a year's worth of groceries or cash. Kelsey Nixon hosts. Between the cooking competition and the food trivia games, Keller calls it an incredibly hard show to host.
"Family Food Showdown"
Valerie Bertinelli hosts Family Food Showdown, which features three rounds of cooking challenges and two families doing culinary battle. Each episode sees the top family take home $10,000. Food Network is on board for 13 episodes.
We look for standout families with really strong culinary chops, engaging stories, challenging situations with high stakes, Food Network president Courtney White said, along with some valuable takeaway information, and of course, beautiful, delicious food.
The Big Family Cooking Showdown is a BBC series with two seasons on Netflix.
ABC announced Family Food Fight last summer, but has not divulged a premiere date. Based on an Australian format, the series will have eight families sharing a kitchen and fighting for a $100,000 prize. Host Curry, who also hosted Ayesha's Home Kitchen on Food Network, said at the time, Cooking is such an important part of my family life, and I can't wait to find others from across America who share that passion for creating delicious dishes and have great stories to tell.
Hail to the Chef
While the family angle is a fresh one, food programming has of course been around nearly as long as television has. Unlike shows about, say, motorcycles or fishing, everyone can relate to food. We all eat, said Walter Podrazik, co-author of Watching TV and TV curator at the Museum of Broadcast Communications. Many of us cook. We all know someone who cooks extremely well.
Some say the seemingly endless strife bouncing about in our nation, much of it brought on by political in-fighting, makes food programming and family food programming in particular a good fit in 2019. Podrazik refers to such programming as, fittingly, comfort food.
People are rediscovering the fun of family, the reassurance of family, he said.
Speaking of fun families, Phil Rosenthal created hit comedy Everybody Loves Raymond, and then shifted to food programming. I'll Have What Phil's Having ran on PBS in 2015 and Somebody Feed Phil, a reimagined take on I'll Have What, debuted on Netflix in 2018.
Rosenthal said he pitched a family cooking show to several networks around 15 years ago. His Family Recipe concept would have two families prepare a signature meal, with one family sampling the other's meal and a winner named. No network bit.
Rosenthal calls food the great connector in our society. We all have to eat, and we usually eat with family, Rosenthal said.
He added that food programming almost always goes down easily. In this peak TV era of dark characters and at times convoluted story lines in our popular dramas, foodie fare is easy background music, Rosenthal said. It's a subject we all know and love.
Time, and the Nielsens, will reveal just how much demand there is for family cooking shows today.
For her part, Food Network's White is optimistic about Family Food Showdown, which she likens to a big family event say, Thanksgiving or a reunion where it's all hands on deck in the kitchen, for better or for worse. Those fabulous food gatherings that are the heart of family, White said. To see those real dynamics of families play out during cooking challenges is incredibly entertaining.
Why This Matters: Shows focused around food and family offer viewers a comfy respite from the contentious cultural mood.
Family cooking shows, which see families competing to craft and serve a better dish than the clan across the way, are suddenly hotter than a Viking Professional 5 Series oven. Family Food Showdown started on Food Network March 3, and Dinner Takes All breaks bread on BYUtv beginning March 20. The Big Family Cooking Showdown is on Netflix, and Family Food Fight, hosted by Ayesha Curry, will run on ABC.Subscribe for full article
Member Exclusive
Get Access to Our Exclusive Content
Learn MoreAlready subscribed? Log In
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Why This Matters: Shows focused around food and family offer viewers a comfy respite from the contentious cultural mood.
