Some recipes work brilliantly as delivered straight from the page (or, in today’s world, the app). Others need a little more oregano or a pinch more salt to appeal to certain palettes.
Veteran unscripted producer Arthur Smith knows a thing or two about translating a good tweak into success. With a career that, in its early days, was steeped in the sports world and event programming via stints at CBC Sports, Dick Clark Productions and Fox Sports Net, he took the plunge to set up his own prodco, A. Smith & Co., in 2000. And as further proof of the benefits of saying “yes” more than “no,” two of the series that premiered during his shop’s first decade are still on the air.
One of those series, Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen, premieres its milestone 25th season on September 24, with a 26th season already shot. Looking back at how the series fell into his lap — or more appropriately, landed on his plate — Smith (pictured) says the success of earlier unscripted outings such as Paradise Hotel under the watch of Fox’s then-head of alternative programming, Mike Darnell, presented another opportunity, albeit one that wasn’t completely obvious at the time.
“Mike called me and said, ‘There’s a tape I want you to see, and it’s of a chef, Gordon Ramsay in the UK,'” Smith recalls. “He said, ‘He’s special. And you need to see this tape.’ And I said, ‘You’re not thinking of doing a food show.’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s with a chef, Arthur.'”
Smith’s reticence stemmed from the lack of culinary programming on broadcast TV at the time. Upon watching the tape, he still had its doubts — not about the star, but about the format itself. The original series, airing on ITV, had the colorful, brash Michelin-starred Ramsay (pictured left) teaching 10 celebrities how to cook, with eliminations determined by public vote, Big Brother-style. Smith maintained that for a food-focused show to work on U.S. network television, “it would have to be really broad — you don’t have to care about the food, but you care about the characters, the story.”
At dinner with his wife in a restaurant with an open kitchen, Smith saw the recipe for revamping the format spring to life.
“There’s a chef, who’s like the leader or the coach, and he’s yelling at the people in the kitchen, and they’re under time pressure, and there’s this whole team thing,” Smith recounts. “And I came back to Mike and I said, ‘It’s a team competition show, and Gordon’s the master.”
Initial meetings with Ramsay saw the chef reluctant at first about the reframing of the format, but Smith was persistent.
“I told him, ‘I promise you at the end of the day that every challenge will be purposeful,'” Smith recalls. “It may start off with confetti or pyro or something like that. But eventually, the challenge itself will test something. It’ll test the palette, it’ll test the leadership, it’ll test their teamwork.”
Once Ramsay signed off, a special restaurant set was constructed on a soundstage with two kitchens to accommodate the teams — the red and blue — and, with Smith’s sports experience serving as a backdrop, a bevy of robotic cameras sending footage to a master control room to capture all the action as it unfolds.
“If you walk into the control room of Hell’s Kitchen during a taping, it feels like you’re at the taping of a live sporting event because there’s action in the kitchen, there’s action in the dining room,” says Smith. “There are lots of things to cover that are going on simultaneously and they’re all important. I remember saying to the crew [on the first taping], ‘You know, we’re pioneers right now.’ It’s like zone coverage.”
The first episode in May of 2005 landed well despite a Memorial Day slot, and the series went on to win its time slot for subsequent seasons. The recipe worked.
“It’s said that if a third season does well, you have a chance of being a long-running show,” Smith says. “But I never anticipated doing seasons 25 and 26.”
The new season sees yet another update to the winning formula, with the participants all 25 and under — part of a Hell’s Kitchen generation, as it were — and recurring challenges such as the blind taste test brought back “with a spin,” says Smith.
In addition to refreshing Hell’s Kitchen for its milestone season, A. Smith & Co. is also hard at work at another long-running franchise heading for a milestone — American Ninja Warrior, renewed by NBC for a 19th and 20th season into 2028. And there’s also the upcoming Physical 100: USA for Netflix — another instance of A. Smith & Co. translating a foreign format, in this case from Korea, for an American audience.
Looking back at the legacy franchises and ahead to the projects on the way, Smith takes a page out of a chef’s notebook, pinning the success of his “winning dishes” on a mix of luck and effort.
“You make your own fortune,” he offers. “And the more you try, the luckier you get.”
Article here