TV Talk: Upper St. Clair grad’s restaurants profiled on PBS; ‘Matlock’ returns

Upper St. Clair native Jamie Brown gained notoriety in her hometown as a standout basketball player alongside her identical twin sister, Kerry, who both went on to play for Davidson College. Since settling in Charlotte, N.C., Brown and her husband, Jeff Tonidandel, are better known as local restaurateurs.

Their endeavors are chronicled in the 10-episode PBS docu-series “Fork & Hammer” (premiering at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 14, WQED-TV), a behind-the-scenes look at a family restaurant business.

This “docu-follow” show, coincidentally produced by Charlotte-based 1986 Fox Chapel Area High School grad Scott Galloway (“Children in Crisis: The Story of CHIP”), explores the Tonidandel-Brown Restaurant Group’s efforts to launch a new restaurant, Leluia Hall, while also exploring the creation of their earlier restaurants (Supperland, Haberdish, Ever Andalo, Growlers Pourhouse, Reigning Doughnuts) and getting to know some of the staff who work at these establishments.

“They had five restaurants [when we started] and were building a sixth and they were moving a historic building that will ultimately become their seventh,” Galloway said. “They’re all in historic buildings that were originally created as something else, and so all of the architecture and engineering that goes into transforming them into restaurants — really high-end, elite restaurants — is fascinating.”

Galloway said the show’s title was a way to avoid viewer expectations that this might be a cooking show.

“We really wanted to focus on Jeff and Jamie as the heads of a restaurant group,” he said. “The ‘Fork’ part of it is the meal, chefs, ingredients and the cuisine, but there’s also the architecture, the design, the transformation of the buildings, the engineering,” which is the “hammer” of the title.

In telling the backstory of how Brown and Tonidandel got their start as restaurateurs, Brown recalls in “Fork & Hammer” driving to Pittsburgh in late 2008 to buy booths after the Roxy Cafe closed at South Hills Village mall. Those booths were used in the space that is now Ever Andalo.

“My mom had called me, and she said, ‘I can’t believe it, but Roxy’s is going out of business,’ ” Brown recalled. “We were heartbroken, but then Jeff was like, ‘Wait a minute, we need to call them,’ and they ended up having a bunch of booths that they were getting rid of, so Jeff and our business partner at the time drove up there with a U-Haul and brought back all these booths that we bought for a fraction of the cost and they were nice-looking and everything.”

The first season of “Fork & Hammer” filmed from June 2024 to May 2025.

“What’s nice about PBS series, public media series, is they’re very much about edutainment,” said Brown, a 1995 graduate of Upper St. Clair High School. “That piece is powerful for my husband and for me, too, because we didn’t want to go into this with lots of people drama. We wanted it to be maybe helpful to people who are entrepreneurs, or who are in the industry, or open their own restaurant or even husband-wife teams who are learning and trying to work together, and have it be more inspiring, uplifting and showing you behind the scenes.”

Galloway said his company, Susie Films, has made many shows for Food Network and though they had conversations with executives there, Galloway said Food Network is reticent to do a show on a restaurant because there’s a certain sameness to it.

“Same building, same people, making the same meal,” Galloway said. “But I’ve always wanted to do a restaurant show, because I think that restaurants are fascinating. They’re very visual. You get a group of people working together to make food that’s highly visual, but there was credence to what the Food Network said about the limitations of a single restaurant. But these guys, they’re about to open their sixth [restaurant] and they’re all totally different. Some of them serve lunch and dinner, some of them serve brunch. Their menu is seasonal, they have 270 employees. They’re moving a building. … I didn’t think it’d be a good fit for the Food Network. They’re much more right now into competition shows. Just talking to an architect who’s an expert in turning buildings into restaurants is something that would not work for the Food Network. It would be too far afield. … Having the breadth of PBS is great.”

Galloway said his camera operators continue to follow Brown and Tonidandel as they build out their seventh restaurant for a potential second season of “Fork & Hammer.”

‘Matlock’

Matty Matlock (Kathy Bates) is back and still scheming to take down the law firm she blames for the death of her daughter.

In the Oct. 12 season premiere (approximately 8:30 p.m. Sunday after “60 Minutes”), Matty and her husband (Sam Anderson) prepare to move on from their endeavors trying to prove the law firm’s cover-up. But, of course, for the series to continue, something has to happen to keep Matty at the firm, which makes their talk of a future away from the firm fairly unbelievable.

That said, there are some good twists through the first two episodes that largely focus on Matty and lawyer Olympia (Skye P. Marshall), Matty’s boss, who’s become either a co-conspirator or an antagonist. The story continues in the show’s regular Thursday time slot (9 p.m. Oct. 16).

‘The Chair Company’

Tim Robinson (“I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson”) returns with another hilarious cringe comedy, but the emphasis is on cringe, which makes “The Chair Company” (10 p.m. Oct. 12, HBO, HBO Max) an acquired taste that not everyone will want to acquire.

Paranoid, obsessive Ron (Robinson) suffers an embarrassment during an important work meeting and sets out to right what he sees as a wrong and stumbles into a conspiracy.

Whether he’s arguing with a young waitress about something inconsequential or hiding under his desk, having a temper tantrum, Ron is his own worst enemy in the funniest, most uncomfortable ways possible.

‘The Alabama Solution’

Andrew Jarecki, the filmmaker behind both seasons of HBO’s “The Jinx,” returns with “The Alabama Solution” (8 p.m. Oct. 10, HBO, HBO Max), a look at inhumane, abusive conditions inside Alabama prisons.

The situation often appears brutal and dire, but “Alabama Solution” delivers more conjecture than proof in many of its allegations, and there’s no “gotcha” moment like at the end of the first season of “The Jinx.”

‘The Last Frontier’

The creator of “The Blacklist,” Jon Bokenkamp, is the showrunner of Apple TV+’s “The Last Frontier,” streaming its first two episodes on Oct. 10.

When a prison transport plane crashes spectacularly in the Alaska wilderness, local U.S. Marshal Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke, “Winning Time”) has to round up the bad guys. Of course, there’s more to it than that and eventually a conspiracy within the U.S. government develops.

“It would be impossible for me not to bring some of the DNA of ‘The Blacklist’ to this show,” Bokenkamp said in a Zoom interview Monday. “It’s different in many ways, but there are some similarities: A little bit of procedural aspect to this show, the various criminals let loose into the rugged barrens of Alaska, are inmates that are as varied and strange as we can imagine, so there’s a similarity there. There’s also an overarching mystery at the heart of the series, so that kind of hybrid where you’re mixing a little procedural, a little serialized storytelling. … You really do get a close-ended story — you do get to catch a bad guy [each week] — but you’re left with questions, sometimes more questions than you came in with.”