Andrew Zimmern was never made a partner on the show that made him famous. So when Travel Channel came back to renegotiate and said it couldn’t match his last raise, he said he didn’t want a raise at all. He wanted them contractually committed to buying ten episodes of a show he hadn’t pitched yet, so the network’s budget would pay to build the production company he would own.
Zimmern tells Ian Schwartzman why he set out to be an only rather than the best, and why that one clause was the only chess move in a business that mostly plays checkers.
Timestamps
00:00 Two dads, a radicalized mother, and a city that was exploding
02:12 The question at the treatment centre that made him switch roles
05:15 Why he is glad fame arrived at 40 and not 25
06:26 “I don’t know how to do this. Can you help me?” at 32
08:38 The pilot that failed and the show that didn’t
09:40 The Trojan horse into the Discovery building
10:41 The bartender who kept telling him to keep going
12:38 “I don’t want to be the best. I want to be an only.”
13:20 Bourdain, Pat Young, and beating Monday Night Football
14:34 Episode three dipped, and one in two hundred come back
15:30 The Tonight Show call he hung up on
16:50 The exorcist he found by wandering off while the crew slept
21:23 Does he regret not owning Bizarre Foods
22:15 The production company that never made him a partner
23:12 A blazer, no shirt, and a James Beard award round his neck
24:10 “I don’t want any bump at all. I want non-monetary comp.”
24:51 How the network ended up paying to build his company
25:20 Media is checkers. That was a chess move.
26:01 Contempt prior to investigation
29:01 The card
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