Kitchen Hijinks

While not quite a show that was canceled before it aired at all, one of my favorite comedy series of recent years was the largely unseen Kitchen Confidential from 2005. I didn't see it at the time, but for me, that's pretty normal. You probably didn't see it at the time, either. Fox aired only three episodes before putting it on hiatus for baseball, and only showed 4 of the 13 episodes before canceling completely. Sometimes it seems to me that Fox has unerring instincts for commissioning great, quirky, oddball television, and then strangling it in the cradle. The cast alone is ridiculously fine: Frank Langella, Bradley Cooper, John Cho, Nicholas Brendon, John Francis Daley, all vamping their hearts out. As you might guess, the show is based on the tell-all book by Anthony Bourdain, and Cooper plays a thinly fictionalized cognate called Jack Bourdain. Jack is a recovering alcoholic and former top chef who gets a last chance to be head chef in a top flight restaurant, the newly opened Nolita, owned by a subtly ominous Frank Langella. The action takes place mostly in the kitchen, the humor is often a bit raw, not to say raunchy, and I suspect some may find the underlying attitude excessively bro-ish. Me, I find the individual performances so charming, especially Daley's fast-blushing kitchen ingenue, that I will re-watch the series almost endlessly. And, thanks to Hulu, you can too.