Alton Brown, Food Network Superstar, on What to Watch During Social Distancing
In some ways, Alton Brown was built for this moment. The Food Network host is known for sometimes uncompromising recipes that you’d be hard pressed to describe as approachable; Brown’s “favorite way to fry an egg”, for example, takes the better part of an hour. But there is an economy to his approach, and the preparation it required, that felt revolutionary in more opulent days. When some food personalities became obsessed with molecular gastronomy, Brown wanted you to embrace the large metal bowl. After all, it’s the perfect tool for popcorn.
When I spoke to Brown last month, it was clear he was trying his best to make the most of things. “I've got nothing to complain about. I've got room to move around, I can see sunshine. My wife is well. So as far as I can tell everything is fine,” he says. And he’s certainly staying busy. He just premiered the new season of Good Eats: Reloaded, where he considers and updates his old advice, and is planning a new season of Good Eats. He’s started shooting and editing quick videos on YouTube, aimed towards anyone with more limited tools than usual. And he and his wife have found an immediate, hungry audience for a weekly live stream of their dinners.
But even Brown has his moments. “One of the most shocking realizations came to me a few nights ago. I woke up and realized that there are parts of this I like better than regular life. I like isolation and solitude. So there are parts of this that I selfishly enjoy. In a weird way. But then I've also found parts of myself disintegrating. Holy shit, I've worn these pants for 10 days. I'm wearing the same pair of pants for 10 days. I'm wearing a shirt where all the buttons have fallen off except for one. And yet for some reason, I keep putting on this shirt every single day.”
Brown, like the rest of us, is seeking emotional release. “We are, at a molecular level, scared shitless, like children. We need catharsis, we need cleansing stuff that can drain the boils. We need our personal boils lanced.” And he’s finding himself drawn to different things than usual and having extremely different responses: “I put on [Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3] the other day, and it made me cry. What the fuck is that!”
To mitigate this, Alton Brown has started to curate his pandemic viewing a bit more actively. “We don’t have a vaccine, we don’t know when we’re going to get a fricking vaccine, but we can at least have emotional anti-venom,” he says. Here is his prescription.
Plague-adjacent Movies
The Andromeda Strain (1971)
Based on a book by Michael Crichton, this follows scientists trying to find a cure for a disease that’s come to the planet via a meteor. “It’s great for anyone who’s paranoid, since it’s separate enough from what we’re experiencing now—it’s plague adjacent … it’s a great movie about scientists working out a problem, which I get comfort out of.” It’s important that you watch the original 1971 version of the film, according to Brown. “There’s a remake from a few years ago, you want to avoid that at all costs. It sucks. Like so many remakes! This is a movie that needs to take place at the time when the original took place.”
Rent from Amazon here.
Godzilla (1954)
Brown credits the Criterion Channel for re-introducing him to the original version of Godzilla, made for a Japanese audience reeling from a nuclear bomb. “Those films were very much about a culture trying to deal with some shit. So I find them oddly current and prescient now. They have press conferences with scientists. Well guess what? We have press conferences with scientists. But [in Godzilla] there’s a decency that runs through them that’s very comforting, that I hadn’t seen before the pandemic.”
Rent from Amazon here.
12 Monkeys
Brown is genuinely upset when he discovers I haven’t seen this 1995 Terry Gilliam film. “It's a really strange twisted comedy set in the future about a world that has been ravaged by a plague,” he says, “and the attempts to send someone [Bruce Willis] back into the past to either stop it or find out what happened. It’s almost beyond description. Trust me. You need to watch 12 Monkeys. It is by far the best epidemic, pandemic, plague movie, ever made as far as I'm concerned. But it's batshit crazy. There's no question about that.”
Rent from Amazon here.
The Omega Man (1971)
There have been many versions of this film, going back to the ‘30s, including Will Smith’s I Am Legend in 2007. “But for some reason, there’s a campiness to the Charlton Heston version that I find really appealing,” Brown says. “I'm a sci-fi fan, but I mostly like sci-fi of a very particular period. The early ‘70s was such a good time for that.”
Rent from Amazon here.
A Level-Headed Source of News
PBS NewsHour
Brown is picky about where he gets his news in general, but thinks it’s particularly important now. “When we’re all locked down trying not to go insane, you have to be super careful with what you put in your head.” He reads the local news, but otherwise gets most of his news from the nightly broadcast of the PBS NewsHour, which he likes for its level-headed approach to the most important stories. “Nobody yells at anybody.”
Watch full episodes for free here.
Escapist TV and Film
The Thin Man
This series of six comedies follows a retired detective named Nick, and his wealthy wife, Nora, as they solve crimes. Brown says the movies are all delightful—“they’re sly and funny and really great for taking you out of time”—but that his favorite part is the dynamic between the couple. “They were constantly drinking, constantly flirting with each other, constantly wise cracking, and they had this dog sidekick named Asta. My wife and I kind of style ourselves as nouveau Nick and Nora. We drink too much, we're constantly wisecracking, and we have a dog whose Instagram following is ridiculously gigantic. The dog has 37k Instagram followers, it’s ridiculous!”
Rent from Amazon here.
What We Do in the Shadows
The FX show based on the movie from the wonderful brains of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi is appointment viewing for Brown and his wife. “We like the fact that we can’t binge it all at once. We try to make it an event. We plan the night, maybe we’ll make a special dinner.” Though the couple likes the show so far, Brown is a bit hesitant to give it a full-throated endorsement. “It’s a very well-written show, but we’re a little worried that they have too much money to spend … we’ll have to see.”
Stream the series on Hulu here.
The Durrells in Corfu
Brown himself is a little bit surprised to be watching this PBS show about a family that moves from England to a small island off the coast of Greece. “It’s Masterpiece Theater bullshit,” he says. But something about its quaint story and limited world is resonating with him. “I fricking hate Downton Abbey and shit like that, I just despise it. But [The Durrels in Corfu] is so removed from our life, and concentrates on this simple existence on this simple island in this simple time. I found myself completely entranced by it. I know that’s because of the pandemic. Some part of my brain needs a smaller, gentler, easier world. Where the little minutiae of life are the main ingredient, instead of, you know, death counts.”
Stream the series with an Amazon Prime subscription here.
The Wes Anderson Canon
Brown and his wife are both fans of Wes Anderson, but don’t think they’d gravitate towards his movies as much outside of the pandemic. “We realized that it’s because Wes Anderson builds worlds that are very much like life, but aren't. It's not quite reality, but it's close. But it's an illusion of reality that we get comfort from.”
Rent Moonrise Kingdom here.
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