Desmond Scott, a Houston-born chef known for making restaurant-caliber cooking feel achievable at home is bringing that philosophy to television. The Wrap reported that Scott has partnered with BET and Paramount to launch Let’s Get It Started, a 12-episode digital cooking series debuting November 3 across BET’s digital platforms, social media, and YouTube.
The format centers on one dish per 20-minute episode, with Scott positioning his audience less as spectators and more as kitchen help, guiding them through professional-level techniques broken into steps anyone can actually replicate. Rather than covering the usual mains and desserts that dominate cooking show formats, Scott is zeroing in on appetizers specifically, a course he argues rarely gets the spotlight it deserves.
What makes Scott’s rise notable is the absence of formal training behind it. He never attended culinary school; his technique developed instead through years of cooking in his mother’s kitchen and later refining his skills once he had his own family to feed. That path has carried him to a following of roughly 3.5 million across platforms, with his culinary TikTok alone pulling more than 10 million likes, built around dishes like glossy pasta, elevated seafood, and reimagined comfort food classics.
Scott opened up about that journey earlier this year in his first magazine cover story, with 26 Magazine, where he connected his cooking to themes of hospitality and fatherhood, describing the dinner table as central to how he defines home. That same conversation hinted at something bigger he was still working on: a plan to teach cooking and self-sufficiency specifically to young Black men. That plan has since become real, launching as the Desmond Scott Foundation, which now runs mentorship and culinary education programming aimed at building confidence and opportunity for the next generation.
His influence has also expanded well past the kitchen. Scott has worked with brands including KitchenAid, Cash App, General Motors, LVMH, Coca-Cola, Ninja Kitchen, Heinz, and A.1. Sauce, and recently stepped into hospitality by designing a Texas-inspired menu for The EDITION Hotel. For Paramount, the deal also represents a shift in strategy: the company has historically invested less in creator-led programming than its competitors, and this partnership joins a short list of similar moves, including Josh Johnson’s rotating hosting role on The Daily Show and Paramount Primal’s Boys for Life, developed with Almost Friday’s Max Barrett.
With a foundation now extending his reach into mentorship and a series bringing his teaching style to a major network’s platform, the real question is whether Scott’s approachable, digital-first style scales the same way once it’s sitting alongside BET’s broader programming slate.