MTV is making a cooking show for millennials, because food is music for the stomach
If there are two things that MTV loves, it’s food and music. And because MTV loves food—and, more importantly, because MTV doesn’t give a shit about music any more—The Hollywood Reporter says that MTV International is launching a new cooking show for millennials. Brothers Green: EATS! will soon air on MTV’s network of more than 90 channels in 160 territories, where it will be seen by kids excited to have something pre-empting their usual viewing habit of not watching any channels, because what the hell is a television anyway? A phone for old people?
The show features brothers Mike and Josh Greenfield, hosts of the YouTube channel Brothers Green Eats, where they star in their own cooking show. The new MTV series will take them out of their Brooklyn kitchen and into locations around the world, where they will interact with chefs, food vendors, and musical talent, trying new foods and interviewing people. They will then return to their kitchen to create a main dish influenced by their travels. The brothers focus on easy-to-make recipes that eschew fancy equipment and only utilize accessible ingredients. The incredibly simplistic output is likely what made MTV think, “Hey, that’s all we churn out, too!”
The decision to sign the brothers was also understandable, given that their videos regularly garner hundreds of thousands of views—their special on “5 Ways To Get Creative With Pancake Batter” has earned more than a million watches, mostly by disappointed sitophiliacs. Also, now that teenagers find YouTube personalities way more popular and influential than even the world’s biggest movie stars, the brothers Greenfield can look forward to guest appearances by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, desperate to boost their lowly Q scores.
Cooking shows are wildly popular, but MTV is confident that their 12-episode order for Brothers Green: EATS! is different from other shows. Buzzword phrases like “We are thinking content for linear that can also live on other platforms” are tossed around a lot in Viacom executives’ descriptions of the series. Josh Greenfield has a more straightforward take: “Our show is going to be unlike anything you’ve ever seen before,” the brother enthuses, perhaps having roughly the same knowledge of cooking shows that Ryan Murphy does of the horror-comedy genre. The show is scheduled to begin airing in April.