Alton Brown's delightfully nerdy, utterly satisfying "Good Eats" is back — and not a moment too soon

Over the weekend, a video tutorial for a “deep fried BBQ chicken-stuffed pizzadilla” entered the Twittersphere. This complex, carefully-plated heap of junk sparked a kind of morbid interest from people all across the platform — from model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen to People’s food editor Shay Spence, who spent over five hours and $80 making what he deemed to be “truly one of the most vile things ever eaten.” The pizzadilla’s advent isn’t incredibly surprising. “Gross Facebook food videos” are now a well-established genre, born out of the success of Buzzfeed’s Tasty vertical, which now brands itself as the “biggest food network in the world.” These videos are, in many ways, antithetical to the current cresting wave of prestige food television —“Chef’s Table,” “Ugly Delicious,” “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" — but feel like an inevitable extension of the “stand and stir” cooking shows of yesteryear. And this is the world to which Food Network favorite “Good Eats” has returned, in many ways as much the anomaly now as it was when it first aired 20 years ago. It’s a complex case to be sure, but well within the wheelhouse of…” Cut to that familiar theme music, a group of vocalists chiming in to finish the sentence: “Good Eats.” When it first aired in 1999, “Good Eats” was unlike any other cooking show on the Food Network, from the way it was filmed — with twisty Dutch angles, and cameras placed inside refrigerators and ovens — to the content.