A Celebrity You’d Never Expect Is Suddenly Going Viral

This week:

• Wait, who is going viral?
• This celeb just changed my whole thinking.
• The person being the absolute worst about The Odyssey.
• I can’t believe this song is this big.
• Ryan Gosling, I get it.

The Week’s Most Unlikely Celebrity

We’re a nation in need of healing. In need of hope. In need of distraction. In need of joy. In need of a “BAM!”

In an inexplicable phenomenon, but one that’s been highly enjoyable, old clips of celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse’s Food Network cooking show Emeril Live are going viral.

There is an awe at the purity of the show’s largely hetero male crowd reacting to a chef demonstrating the proper way to season meat with a hoo-rah, macho intensity that’s typically reserved for their adult softball league games. There is a marveling at Lagasse’s irresistible bravado, but also his accessibility, never once being pretentious or patronizing.

It’s as if whoever started the trend of surfacing these clips knew we were craving something like this, something wholesome and nostalgic to cleanse the timeline. Still, Emeril Live aired from 1997 to 2007, ending nearly two decades ago. Episodes are nearly impossible to find online. So why are they so popular now?

The answers, I think, are in the videos themselves. In Emeril’s Essence, if you will.

In one clip, he teases the audience that he’s going to add one beer to a batter, but then—get this—cracks open a second beer and pours that in, too. The crowd’s cheering explodes with the kind of visceral, intimate approval as if they’d just watched a politician pledge to devote the entire nation’s budget towards the one and only cause they care about.

The videos are making people nostalgic for a more wholesome time of personality-driven television, pre-influencer culture, and when no one would ever imagine calling anything so entertaining and service-driven as “content.” (Gross.)

“TV hosts once held the same power and influence as the gods of Olympus. Your father would have gone to war for Emeril. Your mother trusted Oprah with her life. The threads of fate were held by Ellen,” one X user commented on the beer-batter video.

As Lagasse muscularly guides a potato back and forth on a grater to shred it for a hashbrown, the camera cuts to an audience member shaking his head in almost emotional-seeming disbelief, as if he’s about to shed a tear because he witnessed God perform a miracle. “This s--t is electric,” the video is captioned. Echoing the nostalgia for a different time, another person wrote on social media, “‘Foodtubers’ could never do this kind of crowd work.”

A popular clip shows Lagasse preparing a beef Wellington, with camera shots of the men in the crowd sipping beer and occasionally nodding. The vibes are as if they’re a bachelor party enjoying the crowd work at a comedy show, or watching the game at the bar with the boys and Jim Nantz just made a great point about their favorite team.

“This is positive masculinity,” one X user wrote, contrasting the wholesomeness of the male bonding over a, uh, beef Wellington cooking demonstration to the rampant discourse about toxic masculinity, incels, looksmaxxing, and the male loneliness epidemic.

Social media is unearthing a treasure trove of similar videos.

In one, Lagasse tosses salt onto hamburgers with a superheroic effortlessness that would get an Avengers movie ripped for ridiculous CGI if one of its characters attempted it. (The crowd went wild.) As construction workers gaze lovingly at him in another clip, he spoons meatballs onto spaghetti. They hoot, holler, and whistle. (“Catcalling Emeril’s meat is acceptable catcalling,” someone correctly observed.) You can only imagine the reaction when he introduces the concept of adding lime to a beer.

I spent a full day just collecting links to the videos I saw posted on my timeline. Eventually I had to stop because there were far too many.

The videos, I think, are kind of radicalizing.

The enthusiastic crowd is the epitome of “dudes just being dudes,” but the context of them at a cooking show is so hard to compute for anyone entrenched in the modern-day cultural and news timeline that it comes off as almost revolutionary.

I also think watching Lagasse so masterfully cater his demonstrations to everyday people, especially the ones who probably wouldn’t imagine themselves capable of cheffing themselves, is a reminder of what we’ve lost.

Maybe we are approaching a pivot point of being exhausted and exasperated by influencers, especially the trend of platforming aspirationality over accessibility.

Emeril isn’t trying to convince an army of followers that, to achieve their peak excellence, they must source impossible ingredients, procure unaffordable cookware, and perfect expert culinary techniques. He’s preaching that, hey, put a lime in a glass, mash it with a spoon, and fill it up with beer, and you’ve just elevated your life.

The timing of these videos taking off is also striking to me. It seems like we’re in constant pursuit of the next feel-good mascot to obsess over. A Moo Deng, the hippo. Or Jimothy, the raccoon. Is Emeril our Creole-cooking, adorable animal of the moment?

I’m reminded of when the ’90s game show Supermarket Sweep became the hottest thing on television during the pandemic. When things are at their bleakest, I think we seek refuge in cheesy comfort from the past. Maybe we need to be reminded of good, pure things right now. And maybe it’s taking a proper “BAM!” to bring that to our attention.

A Change of Heart

I love it whenever celebrities complain about how hard their lives are, because it gives me a reason to break my collection of tiny violins out of storage, invite a few friends over, and strike up a symphony in their honor.

But after watching a new clip of Jennifer Garner talking about her family’s experience with paparazzi, the string on my teensiest Stradivarius broke just as we were crescendoing to the climax of our pity-party concerto, and now I think about the whole thing differently.

I’ve been covering celebrity culture for longer than is any of your business, and I’ve never heard someone be so candid and, as such, inspire as much empathy as she did with the story she told on Evan Ross Katz’s Shut Up Evan podcast. She talked about working with Halle Berry on the 2013 law to protect kids from predatory photographers like paparazzi, and the details she gave were shocking.

“If I went through a yellow light, 15 cars would go through the red behind me. They would drive up onto people’s lawns, even on a hillside. We were trying to have our little one play soccer, and the association asked us to stop because there were 20 cars coming,” she said.

“If you show up and you’re trying to get into the pediatrician and you have a sick kid on your shoulder and you’re scared and you can’t get into the door because you’re blocked by photographers, there’s something wrong with that,” she continued. “And the kids are paying the price. Kids were getting knocked over coming out of preschool by photographers who were so hungry to get to me or to Ben [Affleck], trying to get to our kids.”

My snarky intro to this was about how it’s hard to empathize with the rich and famous who profit to the tune of millions (and millions) of dollars for the attention they get when they, from their mansions, complain about that attention. But Garner did a remarkable job of humanizing that, and also showing how horrific our vulture-like interest in celebrities’ lives truly is. It’s actually less of an interest than an entitlement, sometimes. And that makes us complicit in it.

As our parasocial relationships with celebrities through social media, the explosion of podcasts, and a more digital connection upend the industry completely, I wonder how this part of tabloid culture might change—if for the better, or, yikes, worse.

The Truly Neverending Journey

The beauty—or the tragedy?—of when something in pop culture reaches a stratospheric level of popularity is that everyone becomes insufferable about it.

“There’s no such thing as a wrong opinion!” Grow up. When everyone is talking about one thing, inevitably, so many people say so many stupid things. I love it. My song of the Sirens is people being the worst about The Odyssey. I can’t resist reading them. I’m drawn to them. And then it kills me.

So while part of me wants to grab the Cyclops’ attention and ask him to just eat me now when I found out that Elon Musk plans to use his Grok platform to create a “historically accurate” AI slop version of The Odyssey, motivated by his hatred for Christopher Nolan’s “woke version,” another part of me is fascinated by just how petulant and bigoted the richest person in the world can be.

It’s a baffling preoccupation. Related: I’d like to draw your attention to something entertainment journalist Marlow Stern pointed out about Musk’s feelings about Nolan, pre-Odyssey:

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Apparently, This Is a Song

I learned of Ella Langley and the song “Choosin’ Texas” this week, on the occasion of it apparently about to become the biggest number-one hit by a female artist of all time, as it’s poised to surpass the records set by Whitney Houston for “I Will Always Love You” and Mariah Carey for “We Belong Together.”

Now, I acknowledge that, when it comes to modern music, I live a happy, peaceful life under a rock, barely understanding what a Benson Boone is and blissfully ignorant that there are Goose and Geese, and they are different music acts. But I do think that, had I first signed a lease on that rock back when “I Will Always Love You” or “We Belong Together” came out, those songs would have found a way to me.

I finally listened to “Choosin’ Texas.” It’s a perfectly pleasant Temu version of a Kacey Musgraves single, but it’s frankly wild for it to be taking the torch from those two icons.

Ryan Gosling, I Get It

This week, a new poster was released for La La Land, in which the flat hand and limp wrist that star Ryan Gosling has been publicly embarrassed for years has been digitally altered to appear more vertical. Let me just say: Wanting to fix the flat hand and limp wrist in old photos of yourself…I relate.

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More From The Daily Beast’s Obsessed

I talked to one of the funniest people on TV, and she nearly convinced me to dye my hair blond. Watch here.

I watched TV’s most fun new action series, and have a new idea for who should be the next James Bond. Read more.

Apparently, the carnival games at the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce wedding were real. Read more.

What to Watch This Week:

The Dink: It’s been called “the perfect movie to watch on your couch,” which is the highest endorsement I can think of. (Now on Apple TV)

Her Private Hell: It “will either delight you or disgust you,” which I guess is an endorsement, too? (Now in theaters)

Furious: This new thriller is so incredibly intense, but also so addictive. (Mon. on Hulu)

What to Skip This Week:

72 Hours: It’s certainly the only movie out this week with a set piece revolving around whale semen. (Now on Netflix)