TV is awash with shows about food and cooking. But drinking? Not so much. Kenny Herzog reports on why shows about booze have struggled to find mainstream success.

It’s a Monday afternoon in late January, and TV host Zane Lamprey is packing up boxes in anticipation of moving his Studio City production house, Inzane Entertainment, into his LA home. Since its inception in 2009, the company has spearheaded several Lamprey-starring reality shows about the intersection of good booze and cultural traditions. Among them were HDNet/AXS TV’s Drinking Made Easy and National Geographic Channel’s currently airing Chug (which he initially funded via Kickstarter). Lamprey also hosted cult favorite Three Sheets, which aired on several networks including Travel and Spike, from 2006 to 2009.

But after nearly a decade of trying to make drinking-driven travelogues take root on television, he’s shifting Inzane’s focus toward film. “I’ve been pushing this oxcart up a hill for the past ten years, trying to get drinking shows to be mainstream,” he says, weary from being hot potato’ed between networks and weathering undesirable time slots.