“Tiny Chef needs your help.”
That was the title of a YouTube clip shared by the creators of the small, green, 7-inch animated favorite nicknamed “Cheffie,” which showed the miniature culinary whiz crying as he announced the cancellation of his Nickelodeon series “The Tiny Chef Show.” The stop-motion series, created by Rachel Larsen and Ozlem Akturk, appears to have been axed in the process of the $8-billion merger between Nickelodeon’s parent company, Paramount Global, and Skydance Media. (Representatives for Nickelodeon did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.)
“It was a phone call and zero explanation,” Larsen says. “In a way, we didn’t expect that because the show was doing really well.
“We were a year away from the last season by the time we got the phone call that they weren’t going to pick up another season. So we were basically in production purgatory,” she adds. “We often didn’t have a salary, but we kept working just to keep the socials alive.”
In an Instagram post on June 24, the creators asked the series’ fans, known as Cheffers, to contribute to a crowdfunding effort to keep “The Tiny Chef Show” alive. With $130,000 (and counting) in one-time donations, the launch of a fan club with 10,500 recurring monthly members, a line of merchandise including tote bags, plush toys and mugs and a number of brand partnerships in the works, Larsen, Azturk and their 20-person team have remained afloat — but it hasn’t been easy.
“It’s our second family,” Akturk says. “We’re just trying to figure out how to make this sustainable long term.”
In that, the artists behind “The Tiny Chef Show” join the legions of creators navigating the choppy waters of a media landscape seemingly constantly in flux, where awards — the series has two Children’s and Family Emmys to its name — and strong ratings don’t always translate into stability. “When it first aired, it was performing really well with older kids too, so they were putting it on Nickelodeon and Nick Jr.,” Larsen says. “Every report we got was that it did really well, it was popular, and the retention rate from the previous show that kids were watching was 90-something percent.”
It was, for a time, a rollicking trajectory. Larsen and Akturk met in 2016 on the set of Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs,” and by 2018 had launched the web- and Instagram-based, stop-motion animation concept based on a tiny vegetarian chef.
“Back in 2018, we funded it ourselves,” says Akturk. “I was freelancing, Rachel was working on [animated series] ‘Kiri and Lou,’ and we just put our own money into it. Then we put it out on social media … It was more of a test, like, ‘What can two people do without a crew, and without money?’”
A book deal with Penguin Random House allowed the pair to move from New Zealand to the U.S. and film more material, which in turn attracted the interest of Imagine Entertainment and Kristen Bell, among others: “On the Hollywood side, enough inquiries were coming in that convinced us, ‘This is something,’” Akturk says.
By 2020, Nickelodeon had given the green light to a season of eight 22-minute episodes, which premiered on Sept. 9, 2022. Another order, this time for expanded 30-minute episodes, soon followed.
“The hilarious thing is, we thought everything was solved at that point, and we were going to be financially taken care of, and it would be all uphill from there,” Larsen says. “And it just wasn’t.”
In this respect, “The Tiny Chef Show” is a microcosm of the uncertainty that’s plagued both the Hollywood and the broader economy during a series of protracted challenges, from the COVID-19 pandemic and the writers’ and actors’ strikes to the decline of linear television viewership and the rise of artificial intelligence. For example, “The Tiny Chef Show” began streaming on Netflix late last year, a move that had previously saved shows such as “Cobra Kai” from cancellation. But thus far, Larsen and Akturk are in the dark about the deal, which hasn’t led to any immediate prospects of revival. “The Tiny Chef Show” is a labor of love, which adds to the challenge of making it independently. As Larsen, who directs each episode, explains, “A minute of content takes probably three to four weeks to produce, just from conception, writing the script, getting it recorded, having an audio edit, getting it animated, going into postproduction, then being ready. We’re a smaller operation, so we don’t get economy of scale in that way.” Nor is living and working in L.A. cheap. At the end of 2024, the pair downsized to a smaller studio.
Still, striking out on one’s own has its perks, and Larsen and Akturk remain committed to keeping Tiny Chef cooking as long as they can. “We work best when we’re free agents, and we can do whatever we want,” Larsen says. “And, you know, the way we started it is how we want to keep doing this.”
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