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FOOD NETWORK Of the two greatest pleasures in life, food has translated far more poorly into television. Julia Child and that frugal guy were interesting, but in a raw-broccoli kind of way. This nearly five-year-old network makes food more approachable, appealing and sexy than it has been since Jack and Chrissy got into that pie fight on Three's Company. The channel's biggest star is New Orleans chef Emeril Lagasse, who drives his studio audience to squeals by overloading dishes with garlic, Tabasco and wine and simultaneously yelling "Bam!" The network's newest show lands Bobby Flay--a guy's guy of a chef--outdoors in the Hamptons (the Hamptons!) with an annoyingly coy female comic (female!) and a weekly guest. The first week's guest was Inside the NFL host Nick Buoniconti, which saved the waning testosterone level.
DISNEY CHANNEL Compared with its other millennium-ready operations, Disney's network is Frontierland. The programming is filled with middling cartoons, Disney movies and, for no apparent reason, daily back-to-back repeats of Growing Pains. But the whole Mickey Rooney "Let's put on a network" concept pays off in Bug Juice. It's a Real World treatment of 12-to-15-year-olds away at camp. Whereas MTV's show gets mired in the inconsequential whining of twentysomethings ("I can't believe you just stuck your finger in the peanut butter, dude!"), the torture of a 13-year-old boy worried about his first kiss is piercing. Whether parents would sign TV release forms for this show is unclear (the girl who gets so homesick she wails like a coyote is going to have major therapy bills), but it's the best show about preteen angst since The Wonder Years.
THE TRAVEL CHANNEL It is television's responsibility to give us the world without forcing us to interact with it. While the Travel Channel occasionally makes you want to book a flight, it usually cures your wanderlust safely. Lonely Planet, when hosted by energetic Brit Ian Wright, gives you the parts of the world you'd never see even if you decided to use your vacation time to go to Greenland and Ethiopia. Wright will eat anything, climb anything and bother anyone in the cheeriest way possible. Almost as good is Adventure Bound, where insane Australian former bricklayer Alby Mangels delights in endangering his life in creative ways, like filming the marijuana plantations of Caribbean drug lords. It's as though Kramer never left.