Awards Daily talks to Somebody Feed Phil‘s Phil Rosenthal about being in (scuba) danger in Iceland, what it was really like to take a bite of that meat in Dubai, and how he brought Pete Buttigieg and Brian Fitzpatrick together for what may be the most important meal on television this year.
In Season 7 of Netflix’s Somebody Feed Phil, Phil Rosenthal does the impossible.
It’s not touching two tectonic plates in Iceland (something he almost did), nor is it dropping a burger dipped in gold (which he totally did), but it’s bringing two people of opposing political parties together for a meal, in this case Democrat Pete Buttigieg and Republican Brian Fitzpatrick, during the “Washington, D.C.” episode.
“It was easy when I found them,” says Rosenthal, “but it wasn’t easy to find them. In other words, I could not find a Democrat and Republican who wanted to sit together. The Democrats, I have to say on their behalf, more Democrats were willing to sit, Republicans were not. But I had some Democrats who also said no.”
Rosenthal doesn’t understand why it was so hard for two people to simply share a meal together. However, Buttigieg and Fitzpatrick are on the Bipartisanship Committee, so coming together was definitely on the menu for them. When Rosenthal asked the two in the episode what the No. 1 pressing problem is today, they said unsurprisingly that it’s bipartisanship.
“That makes sense because we’re not going to solve anything unless we talk to each other! Yes, they disagree on things. Brian is very pro-life, that’s his agenda, but there’s common ground. For me, the most common ground is, let’s eat! Why don’t we start there? That’s a bipartisan thing we can agree on.”
Rosenthal and I go way back—well, back to April of this year—when I moderated a conversation with him in Pittsburgh on his 28-city tour. This time around, I had another great conversation with Rosenthal about how his show grew in popularity during COVID and why he finds “the world is more open to the rest of the world” wherever he goes. Watch our interview below!
