The Atlantic with some love for Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives being "a rallying cry for a country that is losing touch with itself:
I’ve been watching a lot of Triple D lately, in part because it’s one of those shows that always seems to be on, but also because it is a warm hug in television form. Pop culture may be rediscovering the truism that sincerity sells, but Triple D has been serving up communal kindness for years. I love the show’s low-stakes, no-frills premise: a tour of some of the best diners—and food trucks, and seafood shacks, and taco stands—around the country. I love the dad-jokey banter Fieri gets into with cooks as they make their restaurant’s favorite dishes together on camera.
Mostly, though, I love that Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives isn’t actually about the food. It’s a travel show, an exploration of individual places, as seen through some of the restaurants that nourish the people who live there. Diners have long doubled as symbols of thrift, of simplicity, of community. Triple D takes the symbolism one step further. It explores what the art critic Lucy Lippard called “the lure of the local,” the notion that locations on the map have depth as well as width, functioning not just as places in the world but also as ways of giving the world its meaning. In a moment when many Americans are renegotiating their relationship with their local community, Triple D is a wistful kind of paradox: It is a national show that celebrates local life. The series spotlights the quirks—the accidents of geography and history and culture—that make one area of the country just a little bit different from every other.
"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “isn't this just another blatant excuse to pay the great Shane Torres clip about Guy Fieri?"
Sigh. YES dear readers, YES it is. And you're welcome!
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