It's been three years since Paula Deen found herself in the middle of controversy, thanks to admitting she had said the "n" word. She was dropped by sponsors and the Food Network and spent the next three years slowly rebuilding her TV career and reputation. She appeared in Dancing with the Stars. She created PaulaDeen.com and the new cooking series Positively Paula. Now she has a new webseries Sweet Home Savannah that is hitting the schedule tonight.
Sweet Home Savannah will air on Tuesday nights over at evine. The program is set to follow Paula Deen live from her home, which is only one of the ways the new webseries is setting itself apart. Evine is a retailer, so it's also a webseries for a retailer, and the company notes that no other retailer has a webseries on location from a celeb's home.
Paula Deen has a pretty big connection with Savannah. She lives there in her home, which is called Dogwood. The whole point is going to be pretty home shopping network, as Paula will be using products at home and then links will be provided on the website to purchase the items she is wearing and using. It sounds like a super weird hobnob of items, as sometimes Paula Deen will be using Sweet Home Savannah to cook and sometimes she'll be hawking products from her own closet. When the mighty fall, it's a long claw back to the top.
Not that Paula Deen has had that much trouble maintaining her celebrity. Although she was dropped by a lot of TV stations following her court deposition controversy, sales of her cookbooks continued to do well, even when advertisers and channels like the Food Network decided they no longer wanted to do business with her.
It's not as if Paula Deen is the only prominent figure who has dealt with major controversy and then risen from the ashes. It reminds me of the controversy the Duggar family went through after it was revealed sibling Josh Duggar had molested young women as a teenager and then the incidents had been covered up. In that case, 19 Kids and Counting was cancelled, but the Duggars lived on through Jill and Jessa: Counting On.
We'll have to wait and see how Paula Deen will continue to reinvent herself. She's done well with her own website and with webseries, but we still have to wait and see if she'll be back on television in a regular capacity. Perhaps she doesn't even really need a television platform to be popular anymore.
Sweet Home Savannah will air on Tuesday nights at 6 p.m. ET, only on Evine. To find out what else is coming to television soon, check out our TV premiere schedule.
