Roger Mooking's show--Exotic [something]: Sorry, after just one episode I can promise you I won't be a fan. Host has engaging personality but the shtick of the 'Obedient Ingredient' that I presume is the premise of each show and his unrealistically low-function set (like the lit up spice wall, and the 8 or 9 inch round built-in depression on his prep counter that is an uncovered boatload of kosher salt) just lost me. Nothing to learn from here.
Laura Calder's French Cooking at Home: what a breath of fresh air this woman is. I get why SyBill Spohn
is such a fan. No shticks, no gimmicks, no attitude, no Giada-esque soft porn music: just unpretentiously elegant food I'd like to eat prepared by a low-key, competent woman I might genuinely like to know. Mind you, this assessment is based on only two episodes. But so far, so good.Galloping Gourmet: oh what a delight Graham Kerr was. I remembered that as a wee kid I thought him so cuddly and fun (and therefore 180 degrees unlike any other adult male in my sphere), but it took watching him again after all these years later to admire his great comic timing and a deadpan as good as Johnny Carson's. In the episode I watched, he made a Spanish omelet inspired by a trip he and his wife took to Acapulco. What a different time we live in, now that any of us can buy a fresh jalapeno or serrano chile in any supermarket any time--he used canned serranos. Other things made me cring a bit--this is the guy who said that leaving the skin on a toe-MAH-toe tells him the cook doesn't really care, yet he left the membrane on his bell peppers? And his knife skills were overall rather disappointing. But when he put his dish under the broiler (he made it souffle-style and had to puff the top, couldn't turn this one over) and then had to stand there looking quite silly wearing a uni-bodied oven mitt where there's a side for each hand connected by about ten inches of fabric and tell self-deprecating storeies while it finished, he won me all over again.
Julie & Company: for the most part I never saw Julia's later series which is what I expected this one to be, but to my delight it was an episode of the old The French Chef, though perhaps a later one in that batch. It was called Pizza Variations, I believe, and she so committed every sloppy error she's so famous for it was almost more like one of Dan Akroyd's en-pointe SNL skits than she herself. For instance: when she put the flour for her dough in the Kitchen-Aid she added too little water so while she's talking the flour was jumping out of the bowl, a flour-water combination she mixed by shaking them in a wide-mouth jar went everyplace because she didn't close the jar tightly, she burned one of the pizzas, and another wouldn't come off the peel she made out of the bottom of a former drawer after an extensive and very physical demonstration of just how to make it do so. There was more, but that gives you the flavor--I howled with delight. Oh, and at the end she sat down to serve herself a bit of her creations, and there was a jug bottle (complete with finger hook on the side) of generic red wine, labeled RED WINE in two inch high letters. Talk about bad props...anyway, most entertaining. Oh, and appropos of about nothing, I note that both she and Graham pronounced the herb I call oh-RAY-gan-no as or-ee-GAW-no. Well, she said it more like or-eh-GAW-no, but minor difference.
Nigella Lawson: I've never seen Nigella before but for an episode of Top Chef in which she was a guest judge, however I'm very well aware of her reputation. So it's saying something that even then this was far more lascivious than I expected, though she didn't even lick her fingers once. She just purposefully scatters her descriptions with a lot of nouns and adjectives more common to sex than food. No prude but I can tell I'm not her target audience, and I wouldn't watch her again.
I'd have loved to hear your thoughts on the Chinese Rachael Ray! 
, and the Galloping Gourmet, who was briefly paralyzed after a near-fatal auto accident and, I think, swore off alcohol thereafter.
I dunno, though, the way the shows come across on TV they seem awfully dumbed down, and the part that really bothers me is that if you watch the production techniques carefully, they never actually show the personality cooking. It's either her smiley face, or else it's a pair of anonymous disembodied hands at work. Maybe it's her, but my cynical nature leads me to suspect that she can't cook but is the sock puppet used to give the show its personality. No, I couldn't take this to court, and I've actually watched the show a couple of times. It's just that by the time we reach the end of the half-hour I always feel like the old saying about Chinese food: An hour later, I wish I'd had more.