Nicholas Brendon

Out of the Frying Pan

Bad-boy chef Anthony Bourdain and his notorious kitchen high jinks get fictionalized for the small screen.

One of the potentially worst ideas of the new TV season-turning Anthony Bourdain’s raunchy, spit-in-your-soup best seller Kitchen Confidential into a Fox sitcom-has proved to be one of the fall’s best surprises. Zippy, irreverent, and black-humored (someone’s finger gets chopped off in the pilot), the series is also chock-full of cult-show stars, including Alias’s Bradley Cooper (as “Jack” Bourdain), Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Nicholas Brendan as his pastry chef, and Freaks and Geeks’ John Francis Daley as a newbie cook. It’s Darren Star’s best effort since Sex and the City.

“Yes, I’ve traded sex for food,” says the producer-director. “I’m a foodie myself, and I think they’re related as sensual pleasures.” Confidential takes place in a fictional Manhattan restaurant, Nolita, where, in the pilot, Cooper’s Bourdain is hired to turn the swanky joint into a hot spot by an imperious owner played by Frank Langella. Cooper, after playing a cute human dishrag in Alias and a preppy prick in The Wedding Crashers, savors the lead role. “I know I’m not a conventional TV leading man,” he says by phone from Los Angeles, where the series is being filmed. “But on the other hand, the series totally dovetails with my life: Before I studied acting, I made it as far as prep cook in various restaurants in [his native] Philadelphia. Plus the fact that I get to kiss Bonnie Somerville”-the slinky blonde who plays the restaurant owner’s daughter-“is, as they say, icing on the cake.”

Nicholas Brendon, on the other hand, has a bit of a learning curve. “I opened the next episode’s script, and it says I’m ‘pulling sugar,’ whatever the hell that means, so I guess I’m gonna get a crash course in pulling sugar soon; I hope it’s not painful.” Brendan notes that he hasn’t escaped his Buffy past, pointing out that his time-period competition on Monday nights at 8:30 is How I Met Your Mother, featuring Alyson Hannigan-Buffy’s Willow. “We see each other all the time: We shoot on the same lot!” He also likes the way Confidential is shot “like reality TV,” in a vérité style, to convey the hectic pace of dinner rush hours.

Indeed, Darren Star says he thinks of “Noises Off as a paradigm”-that is, a slamming- (or swinging-) door farce, all hectic action and overlapping dialogue. “If we do it right, people will think of these characters as a little nutty because of the pressure they’re under, and also like them because they’re a little nuts.” Bradley Cooper has another comic model in mind. “I think of my Bourdain not as the dark, jaded guy in the book”-Cooper says he’s never met the author, and has seen him only “on his book jacket”-“but rather a Bourdain like Sam Malone in Cheers: the guy everyone revolves around, the semi-sane guy in a crazy place.”

Kitchen Confidential - Fox premieres September 19 (8:30 P.M.).