Transcript: The Danger Zone

Rob Long asks, is your TV project between 40-140° Fahrenheit? If so, you're likely cooked

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

A few years ago, I went to cooking school, briefly, and I learned a lot. But one of the most interesting things I learned was about food safety.

The worst thing you can do, apparently, is keep food kind of warm. They call that the "danger zone" — the temperature, somewhere between 40 degrees and 140 degrees, when bacterial growth is at its most powerful and efficient. Cold is okay; hot is okay, but the danger zone is not okay — that's when tiny invisible microbes bloom in the Chinese chicken salad, and then later, briefly, in your GI tract, causing all sorts of humiliating problems. The lesson learned here is: don't let your food linger in the danger zone, or be prepared for nausea, painful abdominal bloating and explosive incontinence.

Which brings us to show business.

Right now, everyone is trying to figure out what to do next.

Well, some people know — they had projects moving forward before the strike, all of which were frozen — that’s one of the safe zones — they’re now being thawed out and restarted. That’s the hope, anyway. Some projects started to smell weird when they were taken out of the freezer — we’ve all had that experience with something that’s been in there too long, something a little too icy or old or… just off that we thaw safely in the refrigerator, hold up to our nose, peer at suspiciously and then toss.

For the past month in show business, people have been sniffing a lot of projects that have been in the deep freeze. Some of them just smell way too expensive to move forward with, some of them seem a little old somehow — maybe when they were bought last spring, they seemed really with it and fresh, but you know how it is. Freezer burn.