Somebody Feed Phil

Yesterday morning I passed through the kitchen on my way out the door. The television was on in the den. As I glanced at it I was greeted with video footage of sucker punches being thrown by combatants at a political demonstration in Washington. I didn’t know who was sucker punching who, just that people were clobbering each other in the most cowardly way possible. It seemed to me the perfect encapsulation of life in 2020 America...the sucker punch. Anger, resentment, and suspicion are a toxic brew leading us to terrible behavior on a larger and larger scale with each passing month. Part of it is our ghastly political climate, but most of it I lay at the feet of COVID. Life with a pandemic hanging in the background of every scene of our lives has had the cumulative effect of bringing out the absolute worst in us.

Pam and I have settled in to a routine first started when we became empty nesters several years ago. When our children lived here we insisted on dinner as a family around the table where no communication devices were allowed. Once they left however, Pam and I became discombobulated by the silence of a dinner table without kids. It only served to remind us how much we missed them. So we improvised. It started when we bought this really super cool coffee table that had a top that raised up to become either a desk or an improvised dinner table. I’m typing this blog at it now...

We started taking our dinners at this coffee table where we would watch something on television together. For the two of us this is a big deal since I would never watch television otherwise. Indeed after dinner is over and I have cleaned the kitchen, Pam stays downstairs with it on in the background and I head upstairs to read. It’s our thing. So this one hour a night we watch stuff on television. In this regard, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, etc. have been a Godsend.

Several weeks ago we found ourselves in a serious show hole. We could find nothing satisfactory to watch. I honestly can’t remember how we found it or who might have recommended it to us, but we have discovered an hour long antidote to 2020....Somebody Feed Phil.

The premise of this show sounds exactly like the sort of thing I would hate. It’s a show about a guy who travels all around the world and eats local food for our edification and enlightenment. Are you kidding me? Sounds painfully boring. The twist is this...the guy isn’t some pompous, nose in the air food critic. He’s not some social commentator who uses food as an excuse to lecture us about our ideological failures. No, the guy is possibly the biggest dork in the history of television who knows literally nothing about food other than the fact that he loves everything. He also happens to be Phil Rosenthal, the executive producer of perhaps the greatest sitcom of all time...Everybody Loves Raymond. Although the show is indeed about truly fabulous and fascinating food from all over the world, what Somebody Feed Phil is really about is...decency, friends, and love. It’s about the mystical power found in a shared meal, how dining together is the great facilitator. Its terribly hard to be angry, resentful and suspicious of somebody who you are eating delicious food with. And boy does this man know how to eat.

So far we have watched Phil eating cuisine from Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Marrakesh, Tel Aviv, Mexico City, New Orleans, Bangkok, Saigon, Venice and Buenos Aires. In each place he travels he finds people who are doing wonderful things. Its as if he is trying to catch people in the act of being good human beings. Along the way Phil gets roped into doing local things that place him in awkward and often hilarious situations made more so by his awkward goofiness and self deprecating humor. But perhaps the best segment of each show is towards the end when he FaceTimes his elderly Jewish parents back in Brooklyn. He tells them where he is and they ask him questions. One or both of his parents end up saying something embarrassingly charming. When Phil calls them from Venice, his Dad cracks...”You hear about the street walker from Venice? She drowned!”

We watch this show to have our faith in humanity renewed. It is heartwarming. It’s lighthearted. Phil Rosenthal doesn’t take himself too seriously. He’s just a guy who loves food and loves people. It’s a beautiful thing to see a middle aged Jewish man sitting on a balcony with a Muslim family on the outskirts of Marrakesh laughing and eating together like they have known each other all of their lives.

So, the next time you happen to see someone get sucker punched on television and you need to wash your brain out with something, I suggest taking in an episode of Somebody Feed Phil. Currently, there are 17 of them on Netflix. Pick one. You won’t be disappointed.