Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals Reboot is unwatchable

The 2019 return of Rachael Ray and 30 Minute Meals on Food Network is proof that you can’t always go home again.

Once upon a time, Rachael Ray was an unknown yet fresh-faced, loveable self-taught cook who captured lightning in a bottle and became Food Network’s resident sweetheart. Giggling her way through the cooking equivalent of Evelyn Wood’s Reading Dynamics, Ray’s use of such verbal shorthand as E-V-O-O and yum-o quickly became part of cooking lore. Hers was truly a fairy tale story.

While hosting 30 Minute Meals, Ray was discovered by Oprah Winfrey, who not only had her make regular appearances on her show but also became her guardian angel in launching and producing the syndicated ‘Rachael Ray Show’, which is now in its 14th season.

As if television success isn’t enough, Rachael has also published a whopping 28 cookbooks, with 11 of them having ’30 Minute Meals’ in their title. The show not only ignited her meteoric rise, but it has remained the foundation upon which her food television career was built.

Which brings us to 2019 and Food Network’s decision to reboot and relaunch 30 Minute Meals. Does anyone remember green Heinz Ketchup? New Coke? Wow! Chips? McDonald’s McDLT? Life Savers soda? Yeah, so do we and they’re all ideas that should’ve prompted someone brave to stop the madness before it occurred. Unfortunately, 30 Minute Meals 2.0 nestles itself comfortably among these other failed efforts and should never have seen the light of our television screens.

Conceptually, not much has changed with 30 Minute Meals. What has changed though is Rachael Ray herself and not for the better. When we watch the reboot, we see a disinterested, disheveled host who projects as much joy as someone headed into a wisdom tooth extraction. The once cutesy attempts at humor fall flatter than a crepe, while Ray’s hair is so unwieldy that we can’t help but hope that nobody on the show’s crew feels obligated to eat that week’s meal once the camera stops filming. One would think that Food Network could afford to get Rachael a hairnet.

To us, the show is an unmitigated, unwatchable disaster. And lest you  suggest that we’re the only ones who feel this way, consider some online comments that viewers have posted on Google:

“Please don’t let the hair hang down into the cooking”. “Gone is the bubbly relatable woman”. “Gone is the vibrant peppy person we all know and love”. “Very odd & weird behavior from RR”. “Her demeanor is so off and frankly not entertaining at all”.

Slotted in on Food Network’s Saturday morning schedule among the likes of Ree Drummond, Giada De Laurentiis, and Trisha Yearwood, a trifecta of cheerfulness, the new and definitely not improved Rachael Ray is such a glaring outlier from an appeal viewpoint that the sooner Food Network puts her and her viewers out of their misery, the better off everyone will be.

Have you given up on 30 Minute Meals? Should the Food Network shelf this food television show?