Cooking shows – and I mean Julia Child-style, not Top Chef style (though I do love me some Top Chef) – have the highest rate of retention of any type of television program. That is, once someone starts watching a cooking show, they are very likely to continue watching it until the end. Why? Because they want to see what the finished dish will look like, and maybe even see someone take a bit, smile to the camera, and say how good it is.
I can’t remember where I heard this fact, but it’s one of those things that has been rattling around in my brain for probably close to ten years, and even if it’s not actually true, it’s true to me, you know what I mean?
Class discussions about the “unanswered question” made it that much more true to me. Of course cooking shows maintain interest, because there is a built in suspense throughout from unanswered questions: How is it made? What will it look like? What does it taste like? (Somehow, the fact that we can’t actually taste it doesn’t seem to matter… as long as *someone* on camera tastes it, it’s good enough for us.)
In preparation for the Foodie Kingdom project, I came across a really great curated list of the best food videos on Vimeo. (Highly recommended viewing for everyone in the class.) I poked around and watched a minute or two of several videos, just getting the feel for how people were shooting them and what sorts of things they where highlighting.
One of the videos I clicked was this one, and a Brooklyn restaurant’s famous bacon sticks:
And wouldn’t you know it… this was the only one I watched all the way until the end.
Why? Because they didn’t show the darn bacon sticks until the very end!
That’s true for lots of “maker” videos – if you’re watching something being made, you won’t see the finished product until the end – but this one felt different because it wasn’t sold that way and didn’t feel like a maker video. It didn’t have the same beats and format that you come to expect with those – this was much more meditative, and gave a lot of screen time to the chef.
Anyway, I realize this isn’t ground-breaking or anything, but I thought it was a neat hook to do a feature story on famous bacon sticks and not actually show them until the very end. It would have been so tempting to show people eating them and enjoying them, showing them being delivered to tables, getting quick soundbites from happy customers, and all of that, but instead they went a much different direction, which I think paid off… a good thing for all of us to keep in mind as we work on our foodie nation videos. Sometimes patience can indeed be a virtue.