Content area
Full Text
There are jobs, good jobs and dream jobs. What could be more of a dream job than to travel to the world's most beautiful locations, produce a TV series about food and then sample the wares after each shoot?
Such were the travails of Lydia Tenaglia and Michael Selditch, executive producers with New York-based Zero Point Zero Productions, the company behind the show Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie. The series of 20 half-hours about the world's culinary treasures, top chefs and food trends premiered Oct. 7 on PBS. Sharing the arduous task on several of the stops was Director of Photography Zach Zamboni, who used a Panasonic AG-DVX100 camcorder to capture the mouth-watering footage.
The show came about because executives at WGBH, a Boston public television producer, wanted to further develop the network's lifestyle programming and capture the "foodie" audience, says Tenaglia. Zero Point Zero produced the show with WGBH, in association with Gourmet magazine and Discovery Networks International. (WGBH is the station that pioneered how-to television more than 40 years ago, with Julia Child and The French Chef.)
Funding for the series came from financial services giant TIAA-CREF, which already had a relationship with WGBH and wanted to expand its access to the Gourmet audience. Discovery International contributed money for 13 of the series' 20 episodes in exchange for international distribution rights; Discovery licenses the show overseas as Chic Eats.
Zero Point Zero has produced more than 100 episodes of documentary and reality television and was co-creator and producer of A Cook's Tour, which explores food, culture and lifestyle through the eyes of Anthony Bourdain, author the Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour books. The company recently completed Decoding Ferran Adria, a one-hour special on the Spanish culinary master, and has embarked on the third season of Bourdain: No Reservations, a series for Discovery's Travel Channel that follows Bourdain around the world as he explores culture through food.
To satisfy everyone involved, Zero Point Zero created a 10-minute "proof of concept" video at WGBH's request in December 2005. "That's where we really played up some of the ideas we...