As AB takes to tweeting, I share his frustration in conveying the message. He did succinctly phrase it. Cancel means the network canceled their order. In the case of Good Eats, AB chose to retire (his word) the show. Being someone exceedingly proud of his show, his precious snowflake, labeling it canceled most certainly hurts and, of course, is not true.I don't understand the fervor this statement caused among his Twitter followers and why it suddenly became news a week after the final half-hour show aired.
Yes, fans who love the show can be sad of its end. But all good things must come to an end. He has tweeted, and before that in Food Network's news release said, of his next project.
In the meantime, fans have the three one-hour specials and the final GE book to look forward to. In addition, fans who enjoy Alton outside of Good Eats will have Iron Chef America and the Next Iron Chef.
Seeing the happenings within the first few days of AB being on Twitter, I understand why he shied away from social media oh these many years. Still, I offered him some advice, there be dragons. Sometimes it is harsh, darn near brutal at times, and most certainly not for the faint of heart.
I hope once the initial excitement of him joining Twitter dies down he will have to deal less with questions of the moment and more things about cooking, food, TV, and whatever strikes his fancy for the day.
I wish him happy tweeting.
3 comments:
Where did he make the announcement that he's retiring the show? I checked altonbrown.com (which hasn't been updated in years) and foodnetwork.com and couldn't find anything?
Thanks!
PS I'm disappointed to hear the show is ending. Thank goodness for youtube. At least it's ending on his terms and not the networks. FN has done a bad job of promoting the show. I didn't even know about the new episodes in 2011 until they were over.
Jason,
AB is tweeting but deleting his tweets after 24 hrs. On Monday he tweeted to several people who where talking about GE being canceled that he chose to end the show's run. He used the term "retire."
When his contract was renewed back in March, the FN news release said he was only going to make the 3 one-hour specials, ICA and Next Iron Chef and work on a new project.
Yeah, FN moved the NEW shows to 11:30 pm for some reason, horrible, horrible thing to do to the best show on the channel. I don't think AB and GE has ever commanded the respect from the suits at FN that he deserves.
I agree with Jason, while Alton may be voluntarily retiring the show, the network has been giving GE the shaft for several years now. I remember new episodes being promoted, and aired Mondays at 8pm, with a repeated old show following. Lately, the only reason I've been aware of the new episodes is because I have my Tivo set to record New Episodes, where I'll notice them a day or two later.
Also, I'm not on Twitter, and I didn't see any of Alton's tweets on the subject, but I can see why there would be confusion about the show's fate (i.e. "retired" vs. "cancelled"). There was no concrete indication that the May 2nd episode would be the last. And as a huge fan of the show, I'm quite ticked at FN for the way the ending is being handled, even if the decision was Alton's.
Thanks, Lisa, for the updates that you've been providing. Without them I'd be even more in the dark.
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