Appreciating Authenticity: How We Learned to Love Guy Fieri
I never really got the hate for Guy Fieri. I realize that sounds fashionable to say now, as the pendulum of public opinion has swung fervently in the other direction, but it’s the truth. Granted, a large part of that could be because his fashion sense harkens back to a younger Drew, so I certainly wasn’t going to start tossing rocks in my crystalline condo. But more than that, he just never bothered me. Maybe because I am also loud, gregarious, and have the kind of energy described as “a lot”, though more likely it was due to the fact that his biggest sin seemed to be not caring enough what the world at large thought of him.
On the topic of his food, I have only one experience to speak of since there are no Guy Fieri restaurants nearby. Years ago, I was coming back from a Mexico beach trip with some friends, having experienced some ups and downs in terms of overall cuisine quality. At the Cancun airport, we collectively discussed wanting something familiar and homey… then rounded a corner to find Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen. I can’t remember if the sign actually had a picture of a bald eagle riding a motorcycle or that was just a running joke, but either way the image sums everything up nicely. I remember it fondly, not world-shaking but good, and that’s the limit of my experience with Guy Fieri as a chef.
As a content creator, I saw him all over, as did many of us for the past decade. The man went from winning a reality star contest to building an empire. Now this is where you would expect the deserved hate to start flowing in. Someone is trying to carve out something new, so they make hard choices, play the game to get ahead, etc. But if that happened, it hasn’t come out publicly, and certainly not enough to be the reason why Guy was so derided for so long.
In fact, one could make the argument that his ideas for shows were intentionally positive forces. I’ve eaten at a few of the restaurants featured on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, and generally speaking, they fucking love Guy Fieri. Why wouldn’t they? The man brought national television attention to their businesses, offering the kind of exposure none could dream of buying. Even some of the seemingly sillier programs, like Guy’s Grocery Games, go to incredible lengths to avoid food waste and making sure what isn’t used gets into the hands of people who need it. That’s without even touching on all the charities and generous acts he’s performed through the years.
I don’t know the man, and we are all human, so I certainly can’t attest that he’s never done a thing wrong. There were a few semi-scandals here and there, but most were debunked or flamed out quickly, which means they couldn’t have been a factor in the years of public hate. The truth is, we never had a good reason to hate Guy Fieri.
So why did we, as a culture, decide to treat him so poorly? Well, despite the fact that over half of this blog centers on him, the discussion isn’t actually about Guy Fieri so much as what he represents. Guy Fieri was not playing the societal game, warping his image to fit the desires of whatever network was employing him at the time. He was simply, openly, and unapologetically himself, putting focus on things he genuinely loved and showing sincere excitement about the experiences. That might have been more palatable to the masses at large, except then he went and did something unforgivable: he succeeded.
That wasn’t how things were supposed to work. You were allowed to be eccentric, have a big personality even, but only in limited bits. Duff Goldman of Ace of Cakes could be called similar in some capacities to Guy, including that he’s great, but Duff didn’t have the same ambition. He had his cake show and shop, a niche where it felt acceptable to the audiences of the time. Guy, on the other hand, was taking networks by storm. He was all over, being loud and slightly ridiculous, finding continual success. He was tapping into a collective desire that was unseen in the moment, but growing.
Things move in cycles. A postmodernism sentiment was in fully swing when Guy Fieri’s rise began; the age of meta, irony, deconstruction (which is a topic in itself), and taking nothing at face value. In that climate, he represented a rogue anomaly in the media diet, not the only one of his kind but a rarity to be sure. Being sincere and having fun was supposed to be “basic”, most works were about complicated layers and darker tones. I won’t say we didn’t get some excellent art in various mediums from the moment, but too much of any one thing wears thin.
Over time, the postmodernism wave crashed, as all waves do, washing away to reveal a world where the idea of joy being a valid medium of entertainment was no longer so far-fetched. Go figure, there is fun to be had in watching a person do stuff they actually like. In just the last few years, we’ve seen great shows driven by people with large personalities like Nicole Byer’s Nailed It taking hold. The irony dam has broken, and now authenticity is being appreciated in it’s place. That positions people who’ve been consistently living as themselves for over a decade with quite the leg up, especially considering how many programs as the man puts on.
There’s a reason I titled this blog how we learned to love Guy; because he didn’t change. We as a culture did, moving more toward a desire to see genuine feels and fun rather than five layers of emotional removal. What was ludicrous a decade prior now reads as sincere, and in the age of constantly seeing people we admired rightfully fall for their unseen deeds, wearing shirts with flames doesn’t seem like quite the transgression it once did.
If there’s a lesson to take from this, I think it would be to remember that different ideas succeed in different times. Warping yourself to fit the conventions of the moment can work out well, it would be wild to suggest no one has succeeded on that path. But there is a power to being genuine, authentic, and consistent. It offers the potential to endure, to leave a lasting impact even with works that others deem as silly.