In April 2011, ABC announced that its veteran soap opera All My Children would be replaced by The Chew, an all-food talk show buoyed by the open banter of a cast of culinary experts. ABC Daytime Group President Brian Frons positioned the show as ABC’s response to audience desire for “different types of programming these days.”

The Chew debuted on September 26th to 2.5 million viewers. The audience share helped ABC to continue as Daytime’s #1 Network, but ratings aggregates like TV by the Numbers were quick to point out that even with premiere week inflation, The Chew finished at an overall lower rating with women 18-49 than All My Children managed a year ago. Apparently, even a premiere episode Dr. Oz cameo was not enough to catalyze increased viewership.

Commercial network daytime television is one of the last arenas to incorporate food-related programming into its regular scheduling. Now that The Chew has arrived, I want to consider briefly how the show brings to light cultural and industrial anxieties about both daytime television and food, and how that translates to uncertainty about the status of the daytime audience.

The Chew invites much discussion that will be left untouched here, including the biting snark and boycott discourse surrounding the launch (e.g., “The Spew,” “Screw the Chew”) and the economics of transferring soap fans to a show about food. I will also bypass the formal conventions of The Chew, mainly because the show’s format is just not that interesting. The Chew is the indoctrination of talk television onto the classic cooking show, imbued with the characteristics of a decade’s worth of lifestyle TV and sealed with something more or less pleasant than an infomercial. The segments are short, the giveaways frequent, and the daytime royalty (Dr. Oz, Whoopi, Joy Behar) are quite literally ready and waiting behind ABC’s promotional door #2.

Media have increasingly taken up food, riding the wave of foodie culture that sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann argue exists at the borders of democracy and distinction. Johnston and Baumann delineate a contemporary cultural milieu of food that allows for the democratic tendencies of mass production, instant access, and affordability, as well as the more distinct measures of singularity, obscurity, and authenticity. Interestingly, this bears striking resemblance to daytime television. One could argue that daytime TV, like food, carries paradoxical class-laden (and race, age, and gender-laden) associations. These muddy waters between popular-accessible and the privilege of discrimination serve as an excellent (if somewhat amorphous) frame for considering a text like The Chew.

Allowing leniency for first week jitters, The Chew nevertheless seems hyper aware of its indistinct brand and is subsequently shifty-eyed in its attempt to connect with an audience. This is immediately apparent in its dizzying pace. While Michael Symon (Iron Chef) fries pork at the demo stove, Mario Batali runs to the fridge to retrieve ingredients, Carla Hall (Top Chef) ducks under Symon’s arm to help stir, Clinton Kelly (What Not To Wear) chuckles at his own food puns, and Daphne Oz lists the nutritional benefits of kale. This frenetic environment does serve the function of the show’s goal to “every day host a party in our kitchen, the heart of every home!” However, the madness of five overenthusiastic hosts talking at once and clambering at the stove unintentionally speaks volumes about who and what should be prioritized in the construction of The Chew identity and how this should be relayed to anyone tuning in. Should we focus on the healthiness of the kale, the fancy ingredients flavoring the pork, or the intertextuality of Batali sprinting to the fridge?

Dialogue and themed segments further elucidate The Chew’s uncomfortable straddling of the everyday and the elite. The stress on food costs, for example, is a running theme. A segment entitled “Five Minutes, Five Ingredients, $5 per serving,” leads beautifully into the daily news bit, where Kelly casually picks up the New York Times to reference Mark Bittman’s recent article asserting that home-cooked meals are cheaper than fast food. The attempt to get folks to gather round the table for “food, family, and fun,” then, is undermined by food costs that are really quite expensive ($5 per serving?!) and a subtle foodie back-scratching that, thanks to an applauding audience, glosses over the divided response Bittman’s article actually elicited.

Led by the tagline, “Don’t forget, in our kitchen it’s always okay to talk with your mouth full,” the show oozes with populist discourse–football tailgating tips! Cool Ranch Doritos as guilty pleasure! Oz family anecdotes! Running parallel are recipes for “savory” steel cut oats with tofu Canadian bacon and a tour of Batali’s Manhattan-based emporium of fine sausage and cheese.

As Kelly encourages viewers to “cook alongside us” every afternoon, Oz offers stress-busting foods for those in the workforce. And Hall mentions that the expected inflation of peanut butter is going to “affect my bottom line” because her attorney husband loves peanut butter. All of which leaves one wondering who, exactly, The Chew’s audience might be.

Ultimately, implying that The Chew is a litmus test for any future of daytime programming is likely an overstatement. Indeed, the uncertain hegemony of distinction mixed with the ever-presence of the everyday is a tale as old as television and cooked food. However, what The Chew does with some certainty is expose anxieties about a conceivable disconnect between daytime television and its audience, as well as anxiety about how to position food on [daytime network] television for optimum cultural and financial success.

More recently, as ABC has signed Katie Couric to a syndicated talk show deal, the network’s only remaining soap, General Hospital, appears all the more vulnerable. (Couric’s show is scheduled to air in GH’s current time slot on ABC’s owned & operated stations.)  ABC president Anne Sweeney declared a survival of the fittest competition between GH, The Chew, The Revolution, and Couric, a contest GH seems poised to lose.  While president of ABC Daytime Brian Frons has pitched the cancellations and replacement series as responses to audience demands, there is no question that the main motivation is that the binge-and-purge “lifestyle” pairing can be produced much more cheaply than a soap, and thus can draw a smaller audience and still allow the network to come out ahead.

Yet these developments have been accompanied by some promising high points, steps that offer fascinating illustrations of new industry/fan interactions.  These shifts have exposed and magnified the tensions between network management, the soaps’ creative talent, and audiences, and have suggested that management might be taking viewers’ perspectives into account in a way they have not for many years.  ABC is clearly allowing AMC and OLTL some budgetary leeway in wrapping up their shows, as every day brings announcements of former cast members returning to the screen as the programs conclude.  Here, at least, fans and the soaps’ creative teams are being afforded the chance to have a proper send-off.

Even more intriguing are the behind-the-scenes developments at General Hospital.  Perhaps because there is nothing left to lose, soon after the cancelation announcement, ABC fired GH’s long-running head writer, Bob Guza, a man that fans perpetually blame for the serial’s decline in quality over the past fifteen years.  These complaints are not centered around unpopular couplings or preposterous plot twists; instead they are protests against the program’s male-centered, even misogynist, storytelling, with male mobster characters and their ever-faithful female love interests skewing the program’s moral compass in disturbing directions.  Replacing Guza is a staff writer, Garin Wolf, who wrote the show during the 2007-2008 Writers Guild strike in ways that met with fan approval (along with many other soap writers, Wolf worked under the Guild’s fi-core status).  Among Wolf’s many admirable qualities, in the eyes of fans and former fans, is his respect for and investment in the history of the on-screen world, as well as his privileging of female characters and commitment to romance-centered storylines.

At a time when the future of the show is in grave doubt, ABC finally seems willing to attend to audience complaints. (NBC’s Days of Our Lives is also making major changes behind the scenes, so this may be an industry-wide trend.) Almost none of the discourse on the end of the soaps has considered the content of the shows themselves, seeing such developments as the expanding media universe, the fragmentation of audiences, and the rising numbers of women in the workplace as explanation enough.  Yet many viewers (and former viewers) insist that the problem with the soaps is that they are just not as good as they used to be, and that they would gladly watch more, or return to watching, with some different kinds of storytelling.  To see the networks and production companies giving some credence to that theory as they make these backstage changes is quite remarkable.  The recent wave of cancellations has no one optimistic about the big picture future of the genre.  However, the industry’s newfound investment in heeding viewer concerns may help to make whatever time is left truer to fans’ desires for classic soap storytelling.