Undercooked: The Curious Case of TV’s Ur–Chef Show ‘Kitchen Confidential’

By Mara ReinsteinJune 22, 2023, 10:30 am UTC • 23 min

Any actor working in TV needs to have a thick skin. Having costarred in the beloved yet canceled coming-of-age drama Freaks and Geeks, and then The Geena Davis Show (canceled after its first season), and then Regular Joe (canceled after four episodes), John Francis Daley knows this. That’s why, in 2005, he tried not to get overly excited about a new Fox series he’d just booked called Kitchen Confidential, a comedy about the ragtag staff of a posh downtown New York City restaurant based on the bestselling culinary tell-all by the great Anthony Bourdain, who died in 2018. “Having been quote, unquote ‘burned’ before, I had relatively low and realistic expectations,” he says.

Still. Daley told himself it was a promising sign that Kitchen Confidential was filming on a 20th Century Fox soundstage next to another freshman comedy that also happened to feature a Freaks and Geeks alum. “I remember talking to Jason [Segel] about How I Met Your Mother, and he was like, ‘Yeah, I think there’s something special about it,’” he recalls, before reflecting back on his own project. “I knew that it was special, in that we were all having a lot of fun and bringing our own unique voices to the table.” Both series premiered on the exact same date and at the same time that fall—and then promptly veered in opposing ratings directions.

Kitchen Confidential was a bomb. It averaged an anemic 1.8 rating and fewer than 4 million viewers, tying for 121st place alongside long-forgotten series like Reunion and Inconceivable. Despite having 13 episodes in the can, Fox executives quietly canceled it after just three airings. Only four aired in total. “It was so awesome to see [Jason’s] show flourish,” says Daley, who pivoted out of acting to cowrite and codirect big-screen hits like Horrible Bosses, Game Night, and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. “And it was equally shitty to see ours not.”

Any other show with such paltry numbers would have and should have withered into obscurity. And yet Kitchen Confidential remains a memorable, fascinating, and significant footnote in TV history. The lead character, named Jack Bourdain, was played by Bradley Cooper. Wide-eyed Bradley Cooper. Pre–The Hangover Bradley Cooper. It boasted the urban polish of executive producer Darren Star, who had spent the previous 15 years tapping into the zeitgeist via the hat trick of Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, and Sex and the City. It was also the first TV series to offer an all-access look at the chaotic inner workings of a restaurant kitchen and the colorful characters crafting the dishes inside it. At its center was a rakish antihero genius chef battling personal demons. Without a studio audience providing canned laughs, the fast-paced single-camera show juggled various themes as pans clanked and tension simmered. Kitchen Confidential was The Bear before The Bear, except with Kitchen Confidential you have to log on to a slightly shady, ad-heavy website just to watch its pilot.

“It’s the one that got away,” says creator David Hemingson, who went on to help oversee several TV hits (including black-ish) and wrote the screenplay for the upcoming Alexander Payne film The Holdovers. “I try not to dwell on it too much. But I will say there were a couple of years afterward where I was shell-shocked because I didn’t know how to do it better.”

He returns to the thought later in the conversation: “I love that show. It’s the only poster I still have in my office. Time and circumstances just conspired against us, you know?”

In theory, it was a surefire winning recipe. If viewers could engage with the exploits inside, say, a Boston watering hole where everybody knows your name or the grungy garage of the Sunshine Cab Company, then why not showcase a restaurant kitchen? You’d still have that focus on flawed, working-class characters dramatically confined to a defined space—only in this context, the staff would be busy prepping, slicing, dicing, and plating delectable food. Smart laughs and unexpected warmth ensue. In theory. “The concept appeals to a lot of different walks of life because even if you’re not in the industry, it’s cool to see what goes on behind the scenes,” says Emily Fedner, a former New York City line cook and current cohost of the Friends of Anthony Bourdain podcast. “It’s such a great democratizing space.”

But the kitchen is not necessarily a broadly comedic space. In 2001, Emeril Lagasse attempted to capitalize on his on-camera charisma by starring in a multi-camera NBC sitcom about his life. Despite having Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (Designing Women) as its creator and the eclectic supporting cast of Sherri Shepherd, Lisa Ann Walter, Carrie Preston, and Robert Urich, Emeril was a critical flop—the Los Angeles Times called it “a thudding half-hour of broad nonsense”—that was taken off the air after seven episodes. Even on Friends, some of the least effective episodes were the ones in which Courteney Cox’s Monica had to be in professional chef mode and prove herself a great she-boss. “The greatest challenge [in that setting] is making it compelling and interesting, but not exaggerated,” Fedner adds.

There was one person seemingly capable of shaking up the subgenre. A brash macho figure on the New York City culinary scene, Anthony Bourdain created a media stir in 1999 by way of a restaurant exposé for The New Yorker that came complete with the tantalizing headline “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” The chef expanded the story and broke through to the mainstream via his R-rated 2000 book, Kitchen Confidential. Using unflinching humor and descriptive prose to the point where readers could smell the applewood smoke wafting off the pages, Bourdain candidly detailed how he fell in love with food, idolized his sex-obsessed superiors, rose through the restaurant ranks, and then fell into a substance addiction. Readers also gleaned a chef’s-eye view of the hoity-toity restaurant scene: Not only did Bourdain profanely mock diners who requested dietary substitutions, but he also laid out back-of-the-house truisms like why everyone should avoid ordering fish on Mondays.

Suddenly, food was sexy. Bourdain was a leather-jacket-wearing rock star. The public gobbled it up—sorry, that’s the last food pun for a while—while the industry vied to adapt his raw material for the screen.

“It was so incredibly accurate and honest and funny and searing and revelatory, and I just loved it,” Hemingson says. Determined to get the rights and option the book, Hemingson gathered as much money as he could—and then his agent broke the news that Kitchen Confidential had been snapped up for “10 times the amount” Hemingson had raised. Per Hemingson’s industry sources, director David Fincher planned to reteam with his Seven star Brad Pitt in a drama called Seared for New Line Cinema. That was that.

When the project stalled in preproduction a few years later—Hemingson says he heard that budget issues were to blame; another report claims that the director was too exhausted after helming Panic Room—he made another play for it. New Line still owned the rights, but now execs wanted the narrative to play out episodically on the small screen via its television division. And they put the project in the hands of Star, the creative who had already found white-hot success adapting a provocative memoir into an N.Y.C.-set series. “I told my agent, ‘Put me in a room with Darren Star,’” Hemingson says. “[Then] I just walked in and said to him point-blank, ‘Look, man, I deeply admire what you’ve accomplished. You’re an amazing writer, producer. You gotta hire me for this.’ I sort of said I couldn’t leave until he did.”

The Ringer’s Streaming Guide

A collage of characters from popular TV shows

There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.

From Star’s perspective, the show was brimming with potential. “I was a huge fan of the book,” he explains, adding, “I feel like a restaurant is a wonderful original setting for a show, and we have the book and that title. Kitchen Confidential is such a great title. We wanted to fictionalize the character of Anthony Bourdain so it really wasn’t anything to do with him, and have a creative license to tell this story based on his experiences.”

Star was also enthused about where the show was going to land. Fox was the no. 1 prime-time network (albeit due to boffo American Idol ratings) in 2004, and its clever single-camera comedy Arrested Development had just won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. Star had a proven track record producing envelope-pushing fare on Fox’s schedule, and best of all, with 20th Century Fox Television attached as coproducers, there was essentially a built-in guarantee that the show would make it to air. “I think everybody sort of jumped onto that deal,” Star says.

Even now, he adds without hesitation: “I thought it would have been a really big success.”

For a week in 2005, Bourdain was at Ca’ Brea, a lively Italian restaurant on La Brea in Los Angeles, doing a stint as a “guest chef” to promote a new cookbook. Hemingson, who had just snared the Kitchen Confidential gig, had landed a table, and when it came time to order entrées, he asked for the delicate skate fish … which got Bourdain’s attention.

“He looked me up and down and said, ‘Let me look at your hands,’” he recalls. “I offered my hands to him, and he turned them over and looked at them and smelled them. Then he felt the smoothness of my palms. It was an odd first encounter because he’s, like, literally massaging my hands.” Then Bourdain hit him with the big question: “He said, ‘Man, these are very soft. Have you ever done an honest day’s work in your life?’”

Hemingson explained that he had indeed toiled as a janitor to pay his way through college and had also worked as a bartender, waiter, and line cook. “We started talking about food, and he asked me a couple of baseline questions to just see if I was full of shit,” he says. Bourdain served Hemingson the skate, and the Kitchen Confidential adaptation was unofficially a go. He began to assemble the ensemble, a solid list of early-aughts camera-ready television and film players: Nicholas Brendon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as a pastry chef; Jaime King (White Chicks, Pearl Harbor) as the ditzy, beautiful hostess; Bonnie Somerville (Grosse Pointe) as the no-nonsense floor manager whose dad (Frank Langella) owns the joint; Daley as the naive trainee fresh off the plane from Utah; John Cho (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) as a fish-making specialist; and Brit Owain Yeoman (Troy) as the sous chef.

Somerville, a few years removed from playing Ross’s put-upon girlfriend Mona on Friends, was elated to land the female lead. “I just loved the role, and I loved the script, and I like food, and I love chefs, and I’m from New York, right?” she says. “I remember being on vacation with my mom skiing for my birthday and was like, ‘I am getting this show. I am getting this show.’ And when I got it, it was the greatest feeling.” She did have one lingering thought: What about the lead? Who would snag the plum role of Bourdain’s alter ego? A few weeks before production was set to begin, the mystery actor had yet to be cast.

Circa early 2005, Bradley Cooper was best known, if at all, for playing Jennifer Garner’s best pal, reporter Will Tippin, on Alias. He had just filmed a supporting part as Rachel McAdams’s short-fused fiancé in Wedding Crashers, but the movie wasn’t set for release until later that summer. On paper, he just wasn’t a leading man. “Our initial impulse was Robert Downey Jr.,” Hemingson says of the veteran star, who had just finished a successful arc on Ally McBeal and was still a few years away from Iron Man megastardom. “He had been gaining traction again, so I initially thought, ‘OK, that’s the guy.”

Then casting director Deborah Barylski came into the production room armed with a VHS tape that featured Cooper’s audition reel. “There was a scene from Alias with him and Jennifer Garner in a China House on Sunset Boulevard,” Hemingson says. “It was this incredible combination of total charismatic, cocksure self-belief that he toggled with complete vulnerable insecurity. I know it sounds strange, but it was like Sean Penn and Russell Crowe. I was like, ‘This guy’s an amazing actor.’”

Star insists he saw “it” in Cooper all along. He had already cast the New School–trained actor three times—and boasts that he gave Cooper his first on-screen role in 1999, as a Carrie Bradshaw paramour on SATC. “I was always looking to work with Bradley,” he says. “I knew he loved the whole idea about doing a show about a chef, so he really was my first choice.”

Cooper then delivered an old-fashioned live read in front of both Hemingson and Star in a sparse room in one of the Fox buildings in New York. The two producers traveled back to L.A. to show the tape to network executives and president of entertainment Gail Berman. “The two of us really had to sell the powers that be at Fox that he was the perfect person,” Star says. “But we knew it was all about Bradley.” (Cooper declined an interview for this story because, per his publicist, he is in postproduction on his biopic about composer Leonard Bernstein.)

Cameras rolled on the Kitchen Confidential pilot in the spring of 2005. Instead of a set, the cast filmed inside a working restaurant on Melrose Avenue. (It’s been turned over many times but was most famously Citrus from 1991 to 2001.) “It didn’t make sense to build a very expensive set, so they let us come in there for a week to film,” says producer Jeff Morton (Modern Family). “Then we duplicated the elements of it when we started shooting the rest of the episodes.”

Star ventured behind the camera to see the narrative through. “I wasn’t writing it and I was heavily involved in the casting, so I just had a strong vision about bringing all the elements together,” he explains. In the story, down-on-his-luck chef Jack Bourdain is offered the chance for redemption when a restaurateur (Langella) asks him to take over the kitchen of his swanky Nolita eatery. The catch is that he has just 48 hours to put together his team. “I remember there was a long scene where Bradley is holding up a massive fish and lecturing his whole staff with this great, long monologue,” Star says. “I shot it probably, like, 20 times.”

He included some signature touches. Similar to Sarah Jessica Parker in SATC, Cooper narrated from his point of view. He even provided a bit of backstory, declaring at the outset, “The truth is from the age of 8, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: I was born to cook. I loved everything about it—the heat, the pressure, the sheer joy of doing. But most of all, I loved satisfying people’s appetites, especially my own.” Cut to Cooper cavorting with a revolving door of women and taking swigs from a bottle of alcohol on the job.

Star wanted Kitchen Confidential to be a glossy and quick-paced single-camera comedy. SATC aside, the technique was still fairly innovative for the medium—at the time, almost all sitcoms were filmed before a live studio audience. Star, in fact, had tried to go single camera a few years earlier with the teen comedy Grosse Pointe, but it failed to find an audience next to the likes of Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. With Kitchen Confidential, he reasoned that the series’ mature concept was ripe for that kind of format: “I never conceived it as anything else,” he says.

Bourdain visited the writers room just once for a few hours early on in production—the day before heading overseas to drink fermented mare’s milk for his new show No Reservations. “I asked all my writers and the assistants to come up with five to 10 questions to ask him, and we just fired them at him like a gun,” Hemingson says. “He answered everything incredibly candidly and gave incredible texture to Bradley’s character.” The most interesting nugget: Bourdain’s favorite guilty-pleasure food was fried, super-hot boneless chicken drumettes from KFC.

Back on set, the cast’s chemistry came together just as well as the arranged pyramid of grilled asparagus seen on camera. “It was honestly one of the few shows I’ve done where it was, like, instantaneous love,” Somerville recalls. “We were just laughing hysterically and getting along off the bat making that pilot. Bradley and I hit it off.” Daley seconds, “The thing that was really interesting, and kind of deviated from other shows that I had done, was that camaraderie on set.”

The cast and behind-the-scenes talent were still riding that euphoria in May 2005 when they arrived in New York for upfronts, the annual event when each broadcast television network showcases its upcoming programming to advertisers, media buyers, and the press. Kitchen Confidential would be joining the schedule in the fall, along with the procedural drama Bones and the thriller Prison Break. “The book showed people an entirely new way of looking at food and restaurant culture and introduced people to Tony Bourdain,” the Hollywood Reporter TV critic Daniel Fienberg says, “so the show came with a certain degree of hype.”

Upfronts were no small deal. In the pre-streaming and pre–social media era, broadcast networks ruled the school. New shows were newsworthy. And Fox spared no expense commemorating the occasion, hosting a lavish bash inside Central Park with white tents and heaps of catered food. Alongside network stars like Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Bateman, and the cast of The O.C., Cooper blended into the crowd with his mom and dad.

The Kitchen Confidential team also celebrated the show’s official announcement with its own private bash at Bourdain’s Brasserie Les Halles on Park Avenue. “It was a huge party, and we all got dressed up for this five-star restaurant,” Somerville recalls. “I got to talk to Anthony Bourdain for, like, 30 seconds. It was very surreal and amazing … I 100 percent thought this was it.”

Privately, Hemingson was concerned. Gail Berman had left the top job at Fox for Paramount that March. In came Peter Liguori, the president of entertainment at FX, who had no development ties to the schedule. And though in January Hemingson had heard from network executives that Kitchen Confidential would be airing in the plum post–American Idol slot, there was an eleventh-hour change. The critically acclaimed albeit low-rated Arrested Development had been picked up for a new season; Kitchen Confidential would air directly behind it in the fall. “Now we’re two fast-paced single-camera comedies airing back-to-back,” Hemingson says. “I don’t want to diminish Arrested Development because that was a masterpiece of television. But it was not a good lead-in for us. It just seemed like it was badly, badly, badly programmed.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Liguori himself doesn’t disagree. “I think I made the wrong decision programming it after Arrested Development,” he says. He’s quick to note that he and his programming executives spent “tens of hours” figuring out where to place it: “We ultimately felt that it was a good fit because there was a specific comedic IQ around people who were watching Arrested Development. It required a little more attention and dug deeper into character. It wasn’t another ‘dumb dad comedy.’”

As the summer months rolled on, Somerville fretted about the show’s lack of splashy promotion. “I remember there was just one billboard of Bradley in L.A., and it was on Fairfax by the Grove—and I used to drive by it and send photos of it to my friends and family on my BlackBerry,” she says. “Like, where were the commercials? The ads? The photo shoots? I don’t know the politics of it, but it felt like we were buried.”

Liguori doesn’t push back on this either: “The buck stops with me, and I would say the marketing clearly was not good enough.” Liguori explains that, because Cooper wasn’t yet a bankable star, the network sold it as “a chef on the sojourn to right himself and right his career and puts together his band of friends and revelers who were going to make this work. It’s a tried-and-true formula in television. … And as a programming executive trying to understand your audience, you have to go with your gut instinct.”

There was one last sliver of hope: Perhaps critics would give the show the TV equivalent of a Michelin star. Then viewers’ curiosity would be piqued and they’d tune in—or, at the very least, sample.

But when Kitchen Confidential finally premiered on September 19, reviews were kind but not quite stellar. (Today, it sits at 65 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.) Sure, Phil Gallo of Variety raved that it was one of the “sharpest-looking comedy pilots in recent years,” with “comedic meat and potatoes on the menu.” But Entertainment Weekly TV critic (and future Gone Girl author) Gillian Flynn gave it a B-minus grade, opining that “only a few scenes capture the swagger and passion that made Bourdain’s memoir so enthralling.” And USA Today’s critic Robert Bianco picked at the humor and sniffed, “What’s missing from Fox’s Kitchen Confidential is laughs.”

Somerville recalls a celebratory premiere party for the cast and crew in the back room of an L.A. restaurant. “I’ve gone to one for pretty much every show I’ve ever been on,” Somerville says. “It’s like the best night ever because you’re hugging each other and you’re like, ‘Oh my god! We’re going to work together forever!’ Then you’re up all night waiting to hear how we did.”

The ratings news came the next morning via “the overnights”: Kitchen Confidential garnered about 4 million viewers. Its time-slot rival How I Met Your Mother had nearly 11 million. (Both lost out to Monday Night Football on ABC.) “The numbers weren’t great,” Star says. “But I felt that it would eventually find its audience.” After all, 90210 also premiered to cellar-dwelling ratings back in 1990: “Fox got behind that show and it became a hit. So I had that experience. It’s not only about the numbers.”

The second episode—in which Jack tries to woo an ex (Lindsay Price) and placate his boss—aired a week later and didn’t move the needle. A third episode featured a guest spot from John Larroquette as Jack’s former mentor. Hemingson says Bourdain favored it because it delved into Jack’s sobriety. But the ratings didn’t change. “We’d get the overnight ratings at like 7 in the morning while the cast was down on the set working in the kitchen,” Morton says. “We’d be sitting there going, ‘What do we say?’ We were crushed, but you don’t want to depress everybody. I would come in and try to give excuses or put a positive spin on it. ‘You know, we’re big with people that love dogs and Cambodian Ping-Pong players!’ It was exhausting.”

The show, along with most of Fox’s prime-time schedule, then got yanked in favor of the remainder of the MLB playoffs. The World Series finished on October 26 (go White Sox), but Kitchen Confidential wouldn’t return to the schedule until December. That amusing episode, a mini Alias reunion, would feature Michael Vartan as a haughty, French-accented rival chef. Nine more episodes were ready to go after that one aired.

It didn’t matter. On November 10, Fox announced in a press release that Kitchen Confidential was canceled. So was Arrested Development. “When you sit there and see the numbers that the show delivered and you do focus groups and research on it, you realize at some point that you can’t keep throwing resources and support behind something that doesn’t seem to be clicking,” Liguori says. “It was a real shame because, to Gail’s credit, she put together a powerhouse of auspices. It’s why what we do for a living is alchemy and not chemistry.”

That philosophy didn’t make breaking the news to Star and Hemingson any easier. “Oh my God, you have no idea—it’s terrible,” Liguori says. “The merit of a creative executive is not just the batting average of yeses; it’s someone who can let people down with grace and dignity. And Darren made that very easy [for me] because there is no bigger gentleman.”

As Star recalls, “I personally like Peter a lot, and I think he was a fan of the show. But it was a disappointment.”

Somerville got the blow from her agent. “I was devastated,” she says. “It just really stinks when you love the show. Of course I wanted a job for 10 years.”

For the anguished Hemingson, the news just confirmed all his hand-wringing fears. “How much juice do you really have when the show is not pulling a number and it gets taken off and nobody knows where it is anymore?” he says. “I’m sympathetic, but I wish people had more foresight and had hung on to it.”

Star did get to deliver a prophetic parting shot to the network honcho: “I remember saying, ‘You know you’ll be sorry because Bradley Cooper is going to be a really big star someday.’”

Poor ratings are a viable reason to can a show—there’s no arguing about that. But why exactly did viewers tune out on Kitchen Confidential? It’s certainly possible that they just couldn’t connect to a slick and sleek look inside the culinary underbelly. Or maybe Cooper was too low wattage compared to Downey or Pitt. Maybe few people ever knew of its existence because the show wasn’t properly promoted and was forced to be next-door neighbors with another little-seen comedy.

Or maybe it was doomed from the get-go.

“I don’t know if anyone really thought it was going to be a hit,” Fienberg says. He notes that in the aftermath of the unlikely overnight success of the quirky comedy Malcolm in the Middle, Fox tried to push through a handful of other unconventional efforts. All of them, from Keen Eddie to Wonderfalls to Greg the Bunny, were nonstarters that loitered on the cultural fringe. “Fox was really trying to push the boundaries in terms of what a broadcast comedy could be, and viewers had no interest whatsoever,” Fienberg says. “It was like Fox had trained viewers to know that if a show wasn’t going to air after American Idol, there was a good chance it wasn’t necessarily going to succeed.”

Fienberg suspects that the stainless-steel backdrop of Kitchen Confidential was a detriment, too. “There was still a small stench looming over the idea of kitchen-based TV shows at the time because of Emeril’s show—which was brutally bad,” he says. “People may have been predisposed to thinking it wasn’t a good setting and just weren’t going to embrace it.”

And not even a certifiably cool chef could change that. Then again, Jack Bourdain was no Anthony Bourdain. “I think what made Anthony Bourdain so unique was that he is a character who’s not trying to be a character,” says Fedner. “He was smart, eloquent, interesting, quirky, and unpredictable. But none of it was overly cultivated.”

She adds, “I think the reason the book Kitchen Confidential was so successful was because it felt so real and accurate. The falsification of drama, which is so present in any adaptation, takes away from the authenticity.”

Especially a broadcast TV adaptation. Because Kitchen Confidential aired on the FCC-abiding Fox, it couldn’t delve into the vulgar depravity that Bourdain so lovingly described in his breakthrough book. Jack talks about hard drugs, but he’s never seen doing cocaine or heroin. He’s a big womanizer, but the clothes stay on. Daley is diplomatic about the challenges the show faced: “It was an interesting combination of tones to straddle because we were doing sardonic humor and exploring themes like addiction and all sorts of things you don’t see on network TV.” The show could never firmly grasp what it wanted to be. And that was all too apparent. “We tried to keep the anarchic spirit and show the late nights and incredibly frenetic nature of the kitchen, but we did sand off the edges,” Hemingson admits. “When you’re doing broadcast TV, it’s just not going to have the same kind of grit and truthfulness because you’re accommodating network standards and practices.”

To this day, the actors and producers rue that Kitchen Confidential didn’t air on Fox’s more cutting sister network FX—then the basic-cable home of NSFW fare such as The Shield, Rescue Me, and Nip/Tuck. “I think it would have resonated more if we had the freedom to express ourselves the way David had intended,” Daley says. “FX had nudity at the time!”

Star agrees: “I would like to believe we would have been a hit on FX. We had an amazing cast and terrific writers and wonderful stories. When it got canceled, I really scratched my head. The only lesson I took from it was to not go back and do a network show.”

For his part, Liguori concedes that “a version” of Kitchen Confidential could have worked on FX. But if he had to do it all over again with the luxurious benefit of 20/20 hindsight, he wouldn’t have switched networks … or rescheduled it behind Idol. “I wish I would have worked with Darren to dig deep on a character front and not shy away from the fact that great comedy can come from great drama,” he says. “There is fearlessness when you mine tension and pressure and pain around a protagonist.”

Deep into the pandemic, Morton approached 20th Century Studios to inquire about the rights to Kitchen Confidential. “Nobody saw the first one and Anthony Bourdain was a megastar, so I thought it would be a great time to reinvent the show in current times with more representation,” he says, adding that he envisioned it for a streaming network. “But someone in the studio said, ‘Nobody’s interested in a kitchen restaurant show.’ I got no interest.”

He pauses and laughs. “Six months later, The Bear came out.”

After The Bear, with its impeccable filmmaking, messy behind-the-scenes action, and blend of joyful humor and heart-stopping drama, premiered on FX last summer to overwhelming praise and instantaneous buzz, Hemingson admits he couldn’t bring himself to watch it. He eventually queued it up and had a visceral reaction. “I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s what you do. I should have done that. I should have done that. Yep, this is fantastic,’” he says. He now proudly counts himself as a fan: “The way that they’re able to gin up all the pressures for the hero and then tease out his backstory with the big reveal at the end of Season 1? I’m hooked.”

Nonetheless, he adds, “It’s painful to watch sometimes because I think about what could have been.”

The reality is that Kitchen Confidential’s 13 episodes, including the nine unaired installments, are not available to stream and live on only in a hard-to-find DVD set. Star stores a copy at his home. “I always try to goad people into watching it because I’m so proud of it,” he says.

Cooper never did headline another TV series, though not for lack of trying. Post-cancellation, Morton signed on to produce a Hemingson-created ABC sitcom about paramedics with the actor as the ideal lead. “Bradley wanted to do the show so much that he did a screen test for it at David’s house.” he says. “ABC still wouldn’t hire him. We were kicking and screaming about it.” The pilot, starring a different actor, never made it to air. The now nine-time Oscar nominee, meanwhile, tried to portray a top-shelf tormented chef one more time in the 2015 big-screen drama Burnt. It, too, was a critical and financial flop.

In the mourning after Kitchen Confidential’s cancellation, the cast remained tight. Daley gave his friend Cooper a cameo in Dungeons & Dragons as a 3-foot-tall halfling—“a great full-circle moment for our careers.” Somerville stays in touch with Cooper as well—he actually cast her in a small role as a beatnik roadie in A Star Is Born, but it got cut in the final edit.

“I’ve done a lot of short-lived series and don’t think about them again, but this one stuck,” Morton says in a follow-up email. “I saw John on the Fox lot while he was doing Bones and there was a tinge of sadness. Owain was auditioning for a pilot and we reminisced about how much fun we had. I’d see Bradley several times on the awards circuit years later and there was still that bonding over the show. There’s still a little missing piece from our hearts that we didn’t get the opportunity to succeed.”

But they do take heart in knowing they were part of something that was ahead of its time. “There were no shows about the craziness that goes on behind the scenes in a restaurant,” Somerville says. “We shot like a film when no one else was doing it. Now every network has a comedy without a live audience.”

“Look at all these shows that came on since we were on the air,” Morton adds. “All these chefs are stars. It could have been interesting. But that’s life.”

For what it’s worth, Liguori does have a sincere message to everyone associated with Kitchen Confidential, and to the viewers who waited in vain for that fifth episode to air on his network. It’s a short one. Two words, to be exact: “I’m sorry.”

Mara Reinstein is a New York City–based film critic and entertainment journalist who contributes to Us Weekly, Billboard, The Cut, HuffPost, and Parade.

Mara Reinstein

Undercooked: The Curious Case of TV’s Ur–Chef Show ‘Kitchen Confidential’

Undercooked: The Curious Case of TV’s Ur–Chef Show ‘Kitchen Confidential’

The Ringer’s Streaming Guide

Keep Exploring