Chris Knight

TV Real Weekly, April 2, 2008

President

Knight Enterprises

How does a guy who went to business school, was a political speechwriter, never took a cooking class and never had any TV experience, wind up running a TV company that makes cooking and lifestyle shows that have sold to nearly 100 countries around the world? Well, you have to ask Chris Knight, the president of Knight Enterprises, producer and distributor of the series Cook Like a Chef and Licence To Grill.

“I wanted to be a film director and my parents wanted me to be a lawyer, so I went to business school and nobody was happy,” quips Knight. “But I had always been a writer. My first job out of university was writing political speeches. Then, 11 years ago, when I was a partner in a business management firm, a friend of mine who was a television producer said to me, ‘Cooking shows are all the rage, why don’t you come up with an idea?’ I did, he submitted it to the [Canadian public broadcaster] CBC saying, ‘They get 100 pitches a week, don’t hold your breath,’ but the following week the CBC called back and said, ‘We love it’. And that was my entrée to the television business. I took a leave of absence to do the television series and got the bug.”

Since then, Knight has written six cook books and executive produced more than 400 episodes, for which he does all the recipe development, including shows like Cook Like a Chef, about how to cook, not what to cook, which is available as a finished show or as a format. With the barbeque as the central theme, Licence to Grill (104×30) illustrates the how’s and why’s of perfect barbequing. This Food That Wine (13×30) takes the snootiness and intimidation out of finding the right wine and brings the viewing audience dishes that are easy to make. Road Grill (26×30) is a brand new BBQ series featuring mouth-watering food, with a hip fun new look and a comprehensive recipe inventory for your website. The Edible Roadshow (65×30) explores regional and ethnic influences against a backdrop of varied locales. And Junk Brothers (52×30) is a hip, fast-paced adventure in furniture resurrection and transformation. All these series will be available at MIPTV.

What makes these shows appealing to broadcasters is their uniqueness. Part of Knight’s approach is his use of hosts, which is different from other production companies. “In the last 11 years we’ve worked with 19 different hosts, none of them with any previous television experience,” he says. “Part of our talent is working with ‘civilians,’ if you will, and very quickly giving them the skills necessary to be excellent television hosts. TV consumers these days are so sophisticated that they will not tolerate somebody on camera who is learning as they go. Emeril [Lagasse] is wonderful on TV now, but he wasn’t so great in the beginning. Hosts do not have that ramp-up opportunity. We run a program we call TV Boot Camp. It’s a process we put people through to teach them how to be hosts on television.”

When crafting a show, Knight has two major objectives. “One, can we get 65 episodes out of it? And it’s pretty hard to do 65 episodes without a host, because the viewer bonds with the personality of the host,” he explains. “The second question is, will this sell internationally? And we don’t do a production unless we can answer yes to both those questions.”

While focusing on making the best programs possible for the international market, Knight is keeping his eye on all possible means of exploiting his product. “We consider ourselves brand managers more than television producers,” he says. “We have content shot specifically for the Internet, as opposed to content shot for television which is diced and sliced and turned into bad Internet content. So when we develop a program now, it’s multiplatform: there are books, there is music, there is merchandise, host appearances and endorsements. We manage the whole thing. All the hosts are signed to us. We act as their agents.”

Although Knight has been producing shows for more than a decade, he still loves his work and has not lost his perspective or his sense of humor. “To my friends who are not in the business I’ve likened it to one of two things. Television is like riding a bull. You hang on and try to keep it pointed in the right direction and hope you don’t fall off and get trampled. The other thing I compare television production to is synchronized swimming. Above the water it’s all elegant and beautiful and choreographed and below the water you’re flailing about trying not to drown! That’s television, that’s the runaway train we have in our business.”

—By Anna Carugati