Joel McHale Talks ‘Savory’ Crime Scene Twist, His One Game Show Anxiety and… Pretty Much Everything Else!

Matt Webb Mitovich
·2 min read
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At long last, the Crime Scene Kitchen is ready for more culinary mysteries to be solved.

The Fox cooking competition/guessing game — hosted by Joel McHale with Yolanda Gampp and Curtis Stone serving as judges — plated its first season of episodes back in June/July of 2021, but due to this, that and the other thing, Season 2 was kept on the backburner.

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With the kitchen finally reopening tonight at 9/8c (leading out of Fox’s Stars on Mars launch), TVLine hopped on the phone with the ubiquitous Joel McHale to talk about Crime Scene‘s new menu, his Stargirl run and… well, pretty much everything. (He busy!)

TVLINE | We were getting worried, man. After Stargirl ended and with so many game shows on break, you’ve been on “just” one show at a time, Animal Control.
Yeah, I was getting worried. I was like, “Oh, this isn’t enough. This is ridiculous.”

TVLINE | How long have these Crime Scene episodes been in the proverbial freezer? Who was president when you filmed them?
It was Warren G. Harding. Ironically, my grandfather met Warren G. Harding in Seattle on his way to Alaska. And then Warren G. Harding got pneumonia and died, like two months into office.

TVLINE | That was a nice anecdote.
So, we shot these a year ago in April. And because we shot late, I think that Fox at first wanted it to be for summer [2022], and then it didn’t. So then they held it, and here we are. A year later. I know some of the folks on Stars on Mars (which leads into Crime Scene Kitchen Mondays at 8 pm), so hopefully it’s a good pairing.

TVLINE | Did ya’ll make any tweaks to the formula of the show, or is it pretty much the same?
We opened it up to savory food as well, which makes it somewhat more difficult, I think. All the contestants were like, “Oh, yeah, I watched [Season 1] and I totally could figure it out from home,” and then that classic thing happened, where, “Well, when you’re actually in there, in person, it’s a whole different ballgame.”

There’s also a couple of dead bodies lying around the set, so that really gives it a real sense of crime.

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