After the creators Rachel Larsen and Ozlem Akturk learned that their Nickelodeon series, “The Tiny Chef Show,” was canceled, they had to break it to their star.
“Once we learned of the news, we just knew we needed to tell Chef,” Larsen said in a video call.
Chef, by the way, is a small, cylindrical fellow with black eyes and an adorably garbled voice who lives in a tree stump and enjoys singing. He is animated, but Larsen and Akturk occasionally speak of “Cheffy,” as he is also known, as if he’s a real person.
The result was a stop-motion video in which the Tiny Chef gets a phone call from what he calls “Mickelfodeon.” He then sits down to cry after he is told there will be no more new episodes.
Since the clip was posted to social media about two weeks ago, the little vegan gourmand has received an outpouring of love as well as about $140,000 in donations from fans hoping to keep his content flowing. The character’s newly relaunched fan club, which is called a “Fan Cwub” to mimic Chef’s distinctive way of speaking and requires a paid membership, has drawn more than 10,000 members.
Famous fans have also expressed their support. Dionne Warwick, X commentator nonpareil, posted the cancellation video with strong words for Nickelodeon: “are you proud of making this thing cry? Who is in charge over there? I want a name.”
The fund-raising has bought the creators about four months’ of production. “We’re mapping out monthly costs so we make sure we can last as long as possible,” Akturk said.
But Larsen and Akturk want to be clear: “The Tiny Chef Show,” as it existed on Nickelodeon, has not been saved. Rather, the support is helping them to keep producing the Chef social media videos. Even when the Nickelodeon show was on the air, the social enterprise operated separately.
“It’s like Chef is an influencer that we’re following, and he happened to have a show on Nickelodeon,” Larsen said.
The Tiny Chef videos, which feature Chef cooking and unintelligibly singing, began running online in 2018 and soon turned him into a social media star.
The Nickelodeon version began in 2022. It was structured as a talk show in which Chef (voiced by Matt Hutchinson) and his robot sidekick, Olly (Odessa A’zion), make miniature versions of pizza, chili, fruit leather and other foods. He took calls from celebrity guests like Kristen Bell, an early fan who became an executive producer; other famous people, like RuPaul and Nicole Byer, have served as announcers. The show won a Children’s and Family Emmy in March.
The Chef videos are produced in Los Angeles by a group of about 12 to 15 people. Though they’re designed to make it look like “Chef flipped on a camera and he’s filming himself,” Larsen said, the stop-motion process is laborious and expensive. There is a team of people dedicated to picking out his outfits, another to building the props by hand.
“The crowdfunding had helped cover some of our overhead, enough that we feel comfortable moving forward and filling that gap with brand deals” — sponsorships that will appear on the Chef social feeds, Larsen said. “I want the public to know it literally did work.”
The creators remain hopeful for a more formal revival of “The Tiny Chef Show.” Nickelodeon hasn’t indicated either way whether the network would be interested in more seasons, given the newfound Chef fandom, Larsen said. (Nickelodeon did not respond to a request for comment.)
Akturk said, “We want to find the right partner.”
For now, Larsen, the director, and Akturk, the director of photography, have found a new burst of creative energy in telling the saga of how Cheffy is coping. (In one video, he plays a plaintive version of “Paint it Black” on a banjo; in another, he checks his horoscope.) While they were waiting to learn their fate from Nickelodeon, the creators had felt stuck. Now they have a path forward.
“Our passion really is the day-to-day life of Chef,” Larsen said. “Once we knew his show was canceled it was sort of like, OK, we can actually start really telling his story again because now we know this chapter, for right now, is closed.”
At present, Cheffy is enjoying what recent videos describe as “duvet days” — they show him sitting in bed, ordering pizza, scrolling on his phone. His behavior is relatable to anyone who has received rough career news, including his creators. Larsen said Cheffy is basically going through what she did, just on a delayed timeline.
“I think Chef is handling it the way any of us would, which is giving yourself a couple of depression days and woe-is-me days and eating,” she said. Chef will get his mojo back in a coming video to reflect the adoration he has been receiving.
“This outpouring has been so big and amazing,” Larsen said. “We’ve experienced that, but Chef has not seen that yet.”
Larsen and Akturk have a longer-term plan for where Chef might go. But they are being flexible to allow him to react to his own viral moment.
“I think people are seeing him the way we do,” Larsen said. “We’ve just always felt he’s such a unique and awesome little guy, and we’re feeling the response from the public that matches ours.”
The post A Tiny Chef Inspires an Outsize Outpouring appeared first on New York Times.
