In an auspicious start, director Billy Corben proclaimed during his opening remarks that he’s still editing Canceled: The Paula Deen Story up til the festival deadline and that he feels the film needs finishing touches. Sadly, as the film played through, this started to become more and more evident. Canceled feels like it needs to find out what it really wants to be about.
The film recounts the meteoric rise of Paula Denn to stardom on the Food Network and her indelible mark on not only Georgia cuisine, where her restaurant empire started, but all of southern cuisine. But it starts with a tertiary reveal that Bobby Deen, one of Paula’s sons that also became a Food Network host, is vehemently against the concept of having a documentary at all. There’s a juxtaposition of Paula slightly delusionally, praying that this will exonerate her in everyone’s eyes, which her other son Jamie fully supports, against Bobby. It’s a dynamic that Croben falls in love with and cannot let go of, for better or worse.
The film as it stands now lacks a solid through line vision. It needs a more concise narrative view as it’s basically telling three stories at once without properly focusing on any of them. Corben mentioned in follow up that there was thought of this being a miniseries, which might allow the proper time for all these stories to mesh. But the TIFF version of Canceled: The Paula Deen Story, is sadly just a narrative mess.
Image Credit: Courtesy of TIFF
- Rated: Unrated
- Genre: Documentary, Scandal
- Release Date: 9/6/2025
- Directed by: Billy Corben
- Starring: Bobby Deen, Hollis Johnson, Jamie Deen, Michael Twitty, Paula Deen
- Produced by: Alfred Spellman, Billy Corben, Matthew George
- Studio: rakontur
