Everything We Know So Far About Alison Roman's New Show

Compared to household-name food YouTube personalities like Chef John and Maangchi, Alison Roman is a fairly new face on the video-sharing platform. Nevertheless, her show "Home Movies" (which airs every other Tuesday at 1 p.m. EST and has over 200,000 subscribers) sees the cookbook author and former NYT Cooking columnist cooking up simple dishes that showcase the salty, acidic, and highly umami flavors of her viral palate. Lemons, capers, anchovies, dill, and olive oil abound, as do Roman's staunch superlatives on everything from crumbles versus tarts (the former is "disgusting," the latter is "delicious") to shrimp cocktail (which Roman believes is the only place for ketchup). 

The show debuted in the wake of a media scandal wherein Roman was accused of making anti-Asian statements about Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo in a May 2020 interview with The New Consumer. Since issuing public apologies, Roman has reentered the food world through her independently published work, including her aforementioned show and her Substack newsletter. This fall, she's moving beyond the familiar trappings of "Home Movies" to helm a new show on CNN. 

Roman will jump beyond the YouTube-verse on "(More Than) A Cooking Show with Alison Roman," a CNN Original Series premiering later this fall. "I couldn't be more thrilled to share this show with the world," Roman said in a September 22 press release. "We're all beyond collectively excited to reimagine what a cooking show can be, to make something new and have the best time doing it."

Produced by Zero Point Zero Production, the series will see Roman traveling around New York and beyond to dive into the histories of "her favorite ingredients." Considering the Italian influence in her cooking and her love of seafood, it shouldn't surprise you that Roman will pay a visit to the Amalfi Coast, which stretches along the southern edge of Italy's Sorrentine Peninsula. She won't spend all her time in the Bel Paese (CNN has already found its resident Italian American perma-vacationer in Stanley Tucci), but Roman's proclivity for anchovies and lemons will almost certainly take her to Positano. "Making these episodes this year has been the most fun a person could have," Roman wrote in an Instagram announcement, adding that she'll be "sharing the contents of [her] camera roll" in the weeks leading up to the premiere.