What The Cameras Never Showed You On ABC's The Chew

Popular daytime talk and cooking show "The Chew" ran for seven seasons on ABC, from the fall of 2011 to the summer of 2018, taking over the slot that the soap opera "All My Children" used to occupy. Its original hosts — Mario Batali (restaurant owner), Carla Hall ("Top Chef"), Clinton Kelly ("What Not to Wear"), Daphne Oz ("The Dorm Room Diet"), and Michael Symon ("Iron Chef America") — covered a mix of recipes, live cooking demonstrations, and lifestyle news and topics, sometimes bringing in celebrity guests and home chefs to join in on the fun.

Oz, the daughter of famed T.V. personality and politician Dr. Oz, left in August 2017 after the announcement she was pregnant with her third child, and Batali left the show amongst sexual misconduct allegations, but Hall, Kelly, and Symon made a dynamic trio that carried the show through to receive five Daytime Emmy nominations, winning two, and a nomination for a People's Choice Award.

If you were one of the millions of viewers during these years, you may think you know everything there is to know about "The Chew," but there's always more to learn. Read on for some behind-the-scenes tidbits that the cameras never revealed.

You may have heard about comics who come out and warm up a crowd before a taped sitcom, or a late night talk show, by telling jokes and generally putting on a light-hearted pre-show. The idea is to put the audience in a good mood before the official show starts."The Chew" used a professional comedian named RC Smith for the run of the series to get the audience laughing before rolling "action!" Smith came to "The Chew" team from another food and lifestyle show, "The Rachel Ray Show."

Writer Anna Monette Roberts from Popsugar visited "The Chew" set and described her experience with RC saying, "He greeted the audience, called out various members to learn more about them and poke fun at their responses, and played classic hits that everyone could dance and sing to."

A reporter from Florida Today attended an on-location taping of "The Chew" at Epcot in 2017 and noted, "A half hour before actual taping started, RC worked the crowd, telling jokes, poking fun at random people and not-so-subtly controlling audience behavior ... we were pumped and ready to laugh and clap on cue."

Finally, RC himself told the CT Post about his job, "The warm-up comic is like a combination of ringmaster, baby sitter, crossing guard, and dog whisperer. We keep it moving. We keep it funny. And we let the audience know what's going on." RC was also responsible for guiding the audience on when to clap during the taping.

RC wasn't the only crew member of "The Chew" getting in on the fun — host Carla Hall also frequently liked to get up and dance with the crowd. While it wasn't uncommon for Carla to bust a move on camera, audiences got to see some exclusive dance moves behind the scenes.

This was likely another tactic to make the audience feel comfortable and excited to be in the studio and for the cameras to capture some positive audience reaction footage. "The hosts come out and hang with the audience, shaking hands and taking quick selfies with fans. Carla was the first to come out, and she danced and sang right along with us," said Popsugar reporter Anna Monette Roberts.

It was widely reported that Hall would sometimes even dance in between segments. Writer Natalie Lobel said about Hall, "Her energy was infectious, and the crowd clearly loved her ... she was truly delightful." Christina Thomas was at the Epcot taping and noted, "It would not be a taping of "The Chew" ... if Carla Hall did not dance with someone in the audience. Her energy is amazing!" Now that "The Chew" is over, maybe Carla has a future on "Dancing With the Stars." She did tell Meredith Viera in 2015 that she'd be interested.

How did audiences get into "The Chew?" You could have either booked free tickets for a specific date online in advance or tried your luck and showed up to ABC Studios in New York near Lincoln Center on the day of a taping, hoping for the best. If you decided to walk up on a recording day (Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday) and attempt standby tickets, you couldn't be in a group larger than four, and the minimum age to attend was 14. Because of no-shows, sometimes a walk-up audience could be seated.

"The Chew" recorded two tapings a day, so if you didn't get into the first one, you could stick around and try for the second — but everyone was told to arrive early. Audiences were asked to arrive no later than 8 a.m. for a 9 a.m. taping and 11 a.m. for a 12:15 p.m. taping.

If you were more of a planner, you could submit your request to attend approximately a month in advance and then you'd receive an email confirmation with further instructions that you needed to respond to.

Even if you had tickets to get into a taping, you were still expected to arrive very early (some prospective audience members would get there at 7 a.m.) — and then you might still have a couple of hours to wait until you were seated ... and even more time to kill before the show started taping. In inclement weather, it could also be quite cold outside, without access to bathrooms (although some smart tipsters noted there was a Starbucks nearby).

The good news, however, is that if you were a superfan (or at least a collector of branded swag), once you got inside, there was a small selection of show merchandise like t-shirts, totes, and hats available for purchase while you were in the long line. Additionally, if you got hungry or thirsty, there were water bottles and granola bars available while the audience was in the holding room, sometimes for up to an hour.

Audience member Chris Cockren described his experience: "Before entering the studio, you wait ... and you wait ... in the audience holding room. There are a couple of places to sit down, but the majority of people do stand."

One thing you never saw on "The Chew?" Brand name food. All original packaging in the on-set pantry and refrigerator — cans, boxes, jars, etc — had its retail name covered with "The Chew" stickers to make the name unrecognizable in a process called "Greeking." This is a common practice on film and T.V. sets because frequently it would be too lengthy and expensive of a process to obtain clearance to show the brand, so instead, it's obscured.

The term "Greeking" comes from the technique of obscuring or changing certain letters on logos, making it look like the Greek language, or the phrase "it's all Greek to me" (meaning confusing or not understandable), depending on who you ask. Often Greeking can be done with stickers from a Greeking book, or simple permanent marker. It's unique and special that "The Chew" had its own branding created just for this purpose.

With two tapings per day, three days a week, you may have wondered what happened to all of that delicious food that got cooked in the on-air segments and not eaten on stage.

The good news is that it never went to waste, As host Clinton Kelly explained, they had "a staff of about 100 people who swoop in and eat everything," and "whatever is left over goes to a food bank." Kelly went on to joke with fellow hosts Carla Hall and Michael Symon that it was common to see their camera man "with a pork chop in his hand."

The hosts supported food banks off-camera in other ways, as well. In 2017, as reported by ABC 13 in Texas, when "The Chew" pledged to donate $7,000 to the Houston Food Bank due to the impact of Hurricane Harvey, each of the remaining four hosts at the time (Mario Batali, Carla Hall, Clinton Kelly, and Michael Symon) gave another $7,000 a piece, bringing the total to $35,000.

If the voiceover on "The Chew" sounded familiar, it may be because the man behind the announcements was Gordon Elliott, the show's creator and executive producer. While it may seem odd for an executive to be lending his voice to a production, Elliott had a long career on air before he came to the ABC show. In fact, he had a few guest host stints on camera before creating his own daytime talk show, titled "The Gordon Elliott Show," which ran in syndication in the 1990s. He also had his own food show called "Gordon Elliott's Door Knock Dinners" on the Food Network.

Following his hosting stint, he moved behind the camera and focused further on food, forming Follow Productions and producing Paula Deen's shows on Food Network. He had been producing food T.V. for twelve years before creating "The Chew." He told The New York Post, "If you go to Europe, food networks don't work, because they have not forgotten about food. [But] there's a cultural change going on in America, a growing awareness about what they eat, and how they eat it."

Elliott's instincts were right about the response to "The Chew," going on to run for 1,500 episodes and welcoming high-profile guests such as former First Lady Michelle Obama.

If you were wondering how the non-celebrity judges and taste testers arrived on set, you should start brushing up your social media and video skills — that's one popular way talent bookers find guests.

Cookbook author and blogger Monique McLeod-Polanco recalled how she was asked to be a guest judge for a "You on The Chew" cook-off segment in season seven: "I couldn't believe it when I got a message from 'The Chew' on my Instagram. They liked my picture of my Roasted Tomatoes and wanted to possibly use it on air ... When I started posting food pictures and recipes on my new blog and social media, and hashtagging 'You On The Chew,' I never thought that I would actually get contacted. After a few back and forth messages and phone calls after I was shown, it was decided that I was to come on the show to be a guest judge for the day."

Another woman, Mimi Robinson, shot a video with her sister and her cousins to be considered for the "Dinner With Friends" segment — and it worked. They were invited onstage for the entire episode to enjoy the food and drink prepared that day. For those who think their social media is not enough to get them on T.V., Mimi said "I do nothing for social media ... we make friends wherever we go and we are funny and contagious and you can't help but be entertained. This is how we ended up on 'The Chew.'"

All of the hosts had an awareness of the tone of the show: light, friendly, and welcoming. But the on-air talent were still humans, prone to having bad days like all of us. What about the moments when the hosts just weren't feeling up to smiling for hours at a time?

Clinton Kelly revealed to TV Insider that he developed a saying to remind everyone of their jobs: "If one of us is dragging or in a bad mood — and I'm usually the moodiest — the other four will pick up the slack. We have a saying for that backstage. Instead of "Wake up!" we say "Fake up!" If you're not in a good mood, just get it together and fake it for an hour. Our job is to deliver a lighthearted show."

Kelly also told The Denver Post about a similar saying that the hosts used with more frequency, as a mood-booster pre-show: "We always tell each other before the show starts, 'Party in the kitchen' ... That's what we want: for people to come into our kitchen and have a good time."

You might think that the natural chemistry that developed over seven seasons with the five hosts was because they had all worked together from the very start — but you'd be wrong. The New York Times reported that months before the aired pilot was shot, there was a different show tested with three hosts. Test audiences did not like the unknown talent, so the show was recast with faces that television viewers would recognize: Mario Batali, Carla Hall, Clinton Kelly, and Michael Symon. Daphne Oz came over from the original pilot, rounding out the five.

Carla Hall recalled her initial audition to The Washington Post, saying that she was asked to pick a story out of a newspaper and just talk about it ... and Carla found herself lost in stream-of-consciousness thought. She wasn't cast until she began to shine on "Top Chef All-Stars," when she was called back a second time.

ABC Daytime executive Randy Barone also told The Washington Post "A lot of it really boiled down to the chemistry and how [the cast] really meshed with one another." It seems as if when they put the five original co-hosts together, it was enough for them to justify scrapping the original, unaired pilot. Gordon Elliott told The New York Post he "interviewed about 180 top chefs and culinary stars and watched them work with each other in groups of five" before settling on the now famous quintet.

That famous chemistry and camaraderie wasn't all for the cameras — the hosts famously were friends off-camera, as well, and their relationship exists to this day. Daphne Oz told Fox News, "We are all as friendly off-set as you see on-set ... we have so much respect and so much love for each other; I genuinely think it's because no one is done learning. Everyone wants to have fun and talk and have great conversations and learn something."

"The Chew" was "the most fun any of us have ever had doing television ... It was an unbelievably special seven-year run that was really fantastic," said Michael Symon in Forbes. Clinton Kelly added to TV Insider, "We are five nice people who are genuinely happy for each other's success. The real show is the 90 minutes we spend in the hair and makeup room before we go on camera. We are absolutely howling with laughter." And when asked by Closer Weekly if they all are still in touch, he said "We text each other all the time," and use their group chat "nonstop."

The final three hosts of the show — Kelly, Hall, and Symon — most recently reunited at Kelly's home in New York to share updates on their lives via Facebook live, laughing and joking the whole time.