Nigella is gorgeous, her food makes you want to lick the TV, and she uses charmingly British phrases like “bung it in” and “a good scrunch” that give her show a nice foreign flavor not seen since Two Fat Ladies had their wild ride across the Food Network, but what do we think of her new show?
It seems that a lot of people were underwhelmed, sort of in a, “Yeah, isn’t this the same show I saw on the Style Network?” kind of way. Well, it is, because it doesn’t appear that any rejiggering of her original concept took place. All that’s really new is that it’s now on the Food Network. In their review of Nigella Feasts, Mississippi’s Sun Herald notes that the show “looks and flows a lot like ‘Nigella Bites,’ the program E! Entertainment Television picked up from the BBC several years back.”
Another subject of discussion has been about the filming, which the A.P.’s J. M. Hirsch describes as “unusual camera angles that can make viewers feel they are peering around corners.” For me, those “peering around corners” cuts and angles turned her probably very spacious London kitchen into a tight and tiny urban closet kitchen. As the show went on, I became more and more obsessed with the fact that Nigella just didn’t have enough room to work in. Come on, I feel like that every day in my own kitchen —I don’t need to experience kitchen claustrophobia on television.
Posters in the thread at Television Without Pity were downright irritated by the filming. One poster commented:
One close up of the chopped peppers going into the pan was out of focus till the last second—I know he was supposed to be artsy fartsy, but Mr. Camera Man needs to learn to focus the damn thing faster. That wasn’t artsy, it was annoying.
Another added:
The extreme closeups were a bit much, but what really bothered me was that the camera work seemed quite shaky. Hire someone who can hold the damn thing steady!
Some of that jerky, jangled filming made me and a friend feel downright nauseous. That’s not exactly the reaction you’d want from a food show. Unless you were bulemic.
I completely agree. I felt dizzy and uncomfortable watching the show as the entire thing is shot from the left side of her head! Even shots where we see her walking to the fridge are occluded by a hanging pot rack or some other visual clutter. I’d been looking forward to a change from the hyper-lit sets of other cooking shows on the network, but I found that all I could pay attention to was the camera work, which is such a shame, as she has wonderful ideas in the kitchen.
I too was underwhelmed. I had caught her bit on David Letterman and had mixed thoughts from that… but the show I caught did nothing to make her look flattering and I can’t stand them going back and forth between peaking through hanging pots and 1/2 sec close-ups of food that do absolutely freaking nothing in either entertaining me or informing me.
But what was to be expected… watch any of the “cooking shows” on FN right now and they do the same dang thing with stupid close-ups and bouncing all over the place.
Pretty sickening across the board.