Food Network

In January of 2017, Scripps Network (home of Food Network, Travel Channel, HGTV) made plans to launch Genius Kitchen. An OTT mid-form to long-form platform aimed at millennials and other digital viewers. Scripps reached out to Cafeteria Films to help them fill out their initial slate of programs at launch.

We began pre-production on Carnivorous in March 2017. The concept of the show was originally very simple, stated to us from above as simply “girl travels America eating lots of meat.” When we met our host - the insanely charismatic Courtney Rada - we got inspired by her free-wheeling comedy style and aimed to make an over-the-top show that tried to reinvent itself with every episode.

To do that, we decided to keep the crew entirely in-house to try to control every creative decision we could. That meant flying the same crew of six (and about 10 cases of camera, lighting and audio equipment) from Miami to every corner of the country.

Our amazing producers worked tirelessly to convince some of the best chefs in America (with Michelin stars and James Beard awards) into a letting a show they’d never seen have access to their lives for a little while. We told them we’d be true to their food but that maybe we’d also tell A LOT of dumb jokes.

To keep their trust, we invested in the best cinema-style lighting we could travel with and stayed dedicated to lighting and filming the show in a style that made it seem like a show with a crew of four times as many people. We did this because food shows need to have delicious-looking food but also because the prettier the show looked, the more creative and absurd we could be with our humor on the show.

Our editing team got to work at the same time as we shot to make sure we could make deadlines that were sometimes we just four weeks from the day we wrapped. We delivered masters graded in DaVinci Resolve, social cut downs that we wrote from scratch and high-res stills for promotion.

It was (and remains) a crazy idea to do a TV show that looks this good with this many constraints. But it taught us that a commitment to being impractical is sometimes the secret to making great TV.

As soon as Genius Kitchen launched in September of 2017, they renewed us for a second season. Starting in December 2018, we filmed an additional 16 episodes that finished production in August 2018.

Today, Carnivorous remains one of the most popular shows on the young network.