CHICAGO — Jeff Smith was a frequent and influential TV star. Better known as the Frugal Gourmet, he pioneered the food-on-television stream that is now a raging video river. He was also a husband and father of two sons. He was also accused of being a heavy drinker and monster.

In a five-hour independent documentary series more than five years and 150-some interviews in the making, “I Bid You Peace,” named for Smith’s signature sign-off, gives us a detailed, fascinating and, yes, disturbing portrait of a complicated and reportedly damaged and dangerous man.

He has been dead for two decades, forgotten even longer, but he returns courtesy of writer, director and producer Chris Johnson, a diligent and deep researcher with a fine sense of narrative storytelling who has been working on this series since 2019.

He tells me, “I started this project because I was surprised no one else had. I grew up in Seattle, where Smith was a local celebrity, and remember seeing his show on PBS. I forgot about him for 30 years until coming across fan-uploaded episodes of ‘The Frugal Gourmet’ on YouTube. That sent me down the rabbit hole and started the ball rolling.”

Smith was never my taste in TV. When I was the Tribune's TV critic in the late 1980s, I wrote, “I’ve never found much to like about Jeff Smith, the self-proclaimed Frugal Gourmet. He always strains for the clever, shares his knowledge with pretension and appears too smug and self-satisfied for my tastes.”

But I was in a minority. Having started a cooking show in the 1970s in Tacoma, Washington, by the mid-1990s, his “Frugal Gourmet” was carried on 300-some PBS stations across the country, attracting 7 million to 15 million weekly viewers. His dozen or so books sold more than 12 million copies.

The son of an emotionally remote father and penny-pinching mom, Smith was born the eldest of two boys in Tacoma. He attended college, where he met and married Patty, another student, with whom he would have two sons, Channing and Jason. He became an ordained minister, was a street preacher in Manhattan for a short time and, as a chaplain at the University of Puget Sound, taught a course called “Food as Sacrament and Celebration.”

Around this time, he opened a cafe and catering operation in Tacoma called Chaplain’s Pantry and created a work-study program that attracted teenagers from a nearby high school. And at a community college TV station, he began a cooking show called “Cooking Fish Creatively.” Despite that lame title, the show was a hit and, after he made an appearance on “The Phil Donahue Show,” he was lured here by WTTW.

What was by then called “The Frugal Gourmet,” a title coined by Smith’s wife, the show was based here in 1983 and began national syndication the next year. An image may be forming in some of your minds now: that goateed balding fellow, a high-spirited presence in a striped apron, spouting such familiar phrases as “keep your fingers bent under,” “hot pan, cold oil, food won’t stick,” and “frugal doesn’t mean cheap; frugal means that you don’t waste anything.” He touted “family cooking traditions” and traveled the globe to show and share other cuisines. His aim, he would say in the many interviews he gave, was to make food interesting and cooking less intimidating.

He left WTTW and began production in San Francisco in the early 1990s. And then his world was shattered in late January 1997, when he was sued by seven men who said he sexually abused them as teenagers, most as teenagers working at his cafe.

While the recent #MeToo years have been peppered with accusations of sexual misconduct by celebrity chefs and many in other professions, the Smith scandal came before the explosion of social media.

But those reading newspapers would have learned that Smith denied the allegations and vowed to fight them, his confidence bolstered by the fact that he had not been formally charged with a crime, since Washington’s statutes of limitations on sexual assault had run out by the time of the lawsuit. These were civil charges.

But days before a trial was to begin in 1998, a deal was made. Smith would pay the plaintiffs a total of $5.5 million in a settlement in which he acknowledged no wrongdoing. But the damage was done, and the price was high and swift. PBS pulled all of his shows. Endorsement deals with various products were canceled. His cookbook contracts were voided, his books pulled from bookstore shelves.

He lived his final years in low profile in Tacoma. He just faded away, dying in Seattle in his sleep in 2004 at 65.

This series, wisely, does not attempt to psychoanalyze Smith or make excuses for the reports of his behavior. His ability to hide his failings was not as successful as he might have imagined. A reporter who covered the case says, “In Tacoma, everyone from the waitresses at Denny’s … knew.”

There were hints of potential trouble — he was often said to be drunk on camera — but few dared to mess with their meal tickets, so to speak. One person says that Smith’s accusers “were coming after his money.” Another of his defenders says that people just “misunderstood Jeff’s warmth.”

The series is available for purchase online at ibidyoupeace.com. As for offering it for streaming this way, Johnson says, “It was my only option. I felt the product was of high enough quality and I was proud of it, but no distributor was interested. I reached out to so many people, calling in personal favors and connections for people to look at what I had done.”

The trouble was that many people had never heard of Jeff Smith.

“So, I went out on my own with it,” says Johnson. “I hope that people see value in what I’ve spent all this time working on and want to purchase it.”

Sad and often painful as it is, it is worth it.

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(Rick Kogan is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.)

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