Alton Brown Reveals Why He Left Food Network for Netflix

By Ashley Turner

Popular celebrity chef Alton Brown has revealed why he chose Netflix as his new home. Brown officially left Food Network after 21 years with Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend, the new Iron Chef competition series he co-hosts with Kristen Kish, winner of the 10th season of Top Chef.

Since joining Food Network in the late '90s, Brown has hosted several series, including Good Eats, Iron Chef America, and many other shows on Food Network and the Cooking Channel. Brown discreetly left the network after his last contract with the channel expired in 2020. 

In a recent interview with Variety for Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend, Alton Brown (along with Kish and Eytan Keller) said he was intrigued by Netflix's decision a few years ago to reboot Iron Chef and became an instant fan of the project. "That took a little bit of convincing on a lot of different people's parts. But I knew that the show was going to be happening, and I was sick with jealousy over the idea that I was at the wrong network at the wrong time," Brown told Variety. 

"One day, my agent finally called me up after I had nagged him almost daily, and that was it. It was done. There was never a second thought for me. It meant removing myself from one network, but that was not a hard decision. Timing just worked out that I was able to extricate myself from that."After significant success on Japanese TV, where the show originated with Fuji Television, Iron Chef premiered on Food Network in 2005. Netflix picked up the series after Food Network did not renew it after 13 seasons. 

The executive producer and director of Iron Chef, Eytan Keller, told Variety he met Brown when the show debuted on Food Network."I actually acquired the international rights to Iron Chef, so I was involved beyond just being on Scripps, at that time, and I had the option for the North American rights once-and-if Food Network decided not to reorder," Keller explained. 

"We were all lucky enough with our good fortune that they decided they weren't going to move forward." So, that triggered my option, and then the bigger job began, which is how do we make this different, so it's not just the same show on a different platform."

While Keller said he considered bringing the show to broadcast and had offers, "I just felt that the best home for this was going to be Netflix, both from a creative standpoint and the way they responded in the room. The global aspect of it and to be able to reposition this show worldwide is tremendous."

Keller revealed that he felt "lucky" the show wasn't renewed at Food Network. "We did it for Food Network for almost 13 years, and we were constantly asking them to reinvent certain elements in the format and to change the environment and to improve and refresh Kitchen Stadium," he said. "The uniqueness of it was waning. We made a lot of suggestions, and they did not want to go in that in that direction."

"For a long time, we tried to convince Food Network to reorder it and gave them different format changes and options to refresh it and make it work and many of those changes were not ones that would have increased the budget, so it wasn't a budgetary consideration, but they just for whatever reason moved in a different direction. All these platforms have their reason for saying yes or no, and they decided that their arc for "Iron Chef" was done."

The greatest advantage of the Netflix streaming model, according to Brown, "...is that there's not a commercial break every four minutes...It allows for more nuanced storytelling, so that's a huge game-changer," he said. "The second one is that because it's streaming, people can binge the whole thing and that allows us story arcs that are longer than just one episode. From a storytelling standpoint, it's just radically different. "

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