Wednesday, August 18, 2004
"Cookin' Cheap" as a published academic study?!
Larry Bly
Larry Bly runs an ad agency and does freelance writing in the Roanoke area.
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Just when I thought we'd thrown the last shovel of dirt on the old Cookin' Cheap TV show that ran successfully on Blue Ridge Public Television for 22 years, comes a letter and a book in the mail from Georgia State University. Turns out that a study they began about the show in the early '90s has finally been published as an academic piece!
The article in Television & New Media (Sage Publications) was researched and written by Greg Smith, Georgia State University (Department of Communication) and Pamela Wilson, Reinhardt College.
Both Laban Johnson and I were interviewed at length for the study. It's pretty high-brow reading for such a low-brow and low-budget show. It digs deeply into the elements that made the show a hit on so many levels and took it to the heights of national syndication. It was the only show of significance produced locally, I think, and the only one to attain such attention nationally.
Current TV management aside, the folks who watched the show adored it. I have more than 500 e-mails from distraught viewers regarding its demise. I've gone on to other things: Two TV shows (one of which will soon being airing in 250,000 Northern Virginia homes), a Public Radio big band show and writing a weekly column for Roanoke.com. So after having put Cookin' Cheap to bed for all time, this report came as a surprise.
Regular viewers to the show would be hard-pressed to understand academia's version: "Our methodological approach to this study has been an interpretive, empirical one drawing on a combination of textual analysis, historical reception study, and ethnographic participation/observation." Would someone pass the gravy please while I digest that one!
The study incluces viewer letters in which people compliment the show on its lack of pretensions, imploring us to keep it simple just like we cook at home. And that was one of the keys to the program. The other, according to the report, was inclusion of the audience as a part of the show (letters, including less than complimentary mail read on the air), the staff (Johnson always said we were an ensemble production in the truest sense of the term), and other elements that made for "The Cookin' Cheap family" of viewers.
Great detail is given to the Southern angle of the show. Both Laban and I grew up in the South and people in markets like Philadelphia seemed to revel in our localisms. I'm quoted as saying "Oh, I think there's a LOT that's Southern about the show. In fact, I think that's one of the things people like about the show -- they find it Southern and charming. We hear that a lot from people up North and out West. I mean we don't work real hard to do that -- but we ARE Southern."
The study goes into some of the other elements that made the show fun for viewers: "... the possibility of chaos is never far away ... Although these cooking disasters are not central to the comedy of COOKIN' CHEAP, the possibility that such events might happen is crucial to the humor, which shares much of the tradition of theatrical farce." Laban would have liked that: a man of the theater always; his first love.
Other areas heavily covered have to do with Southern men and cooking. "COOKIN' CHEAP shows an alternative view of Southern masculinity: one that is both sympathetic and non-authoritarian, one that acknowledges matriarchal traditions as primary influences, one with the "gentlemanly" charm of the old South but rooted in a more working-class and less aristocratic class habitus."
That's easy for them to say.
In summing up the 20-page report on this silly show: "The careful construction and maintenance of this show's cheapness activates old sentiments of community and values in a land overrun by commodities. In an era where Starbucks threatens the roadside diner and where 'reality' television becomes overproduced dramatizations of artificially created situations, COOKIN CHEAP reactivates the pleasures of simple comfort food repackaged for the microwave society."
Heck, we were just out to have a good time, Johnson and Bly, and fortunately a lot of other people had a good time watching. It will never be repeated, the magic between us on the air. But it was mighty fun for 22 seasons. It's good that something so simple managed to stand out so much. And now we're a part of the permanent printed record. I'm mighty proud.
Bly for now.
