Sam Farber, Creator of Oxo Utensils, Dies at 88

The cause was complications of a recent fall, his son John said.

Oxo took root in the late 1980s, when Mr. Farber, ostensibly retired, and his wife, Betsey, were making an apple tart in their rented home in the south of France. Preparing the apples, Ms. Farber, who has mild arthritis in her hands, was exasperated by their unwieldy peeler, which she found painful to use.

Mr. Farber knew housewares — he had founded Copco, a maker of brightly colored enameled cast-iron cookware, in 1960 and run the company before selling it in 1982. He immediately discerned a gap in the market: kitchen devices that were as comfortable as they were functional, designed not only for cooks with hand problems but for all cooks.

With John Farber, the couple founded Oxo in Manhattan soon afterward. (Sam Farber chose the name for its backward, upside-down and vertical graphic symmetry.) Enlisting Smart Design, a New York industrial design concern, they created Oxo’s Good Grips line of kitchen tools.

Made with a spare, minimalist aesthetic in mind, the tools sported what would become the line’s distinctive hallmark: fat black handles of a soft plastic known as Santoprene, shaped and angled to be easy on the hand.

The line was unveiled in 1990 at the Gourmet Products Show in San Francisco. Though its prices left some commercial buyers skeptical at first — a Good Grips potato peeler cost about $6, compared with about $2 for a conventional peeler — it soon proved a hit with consumers.

The company’s products have won many design awards and are ubiquitous today in hardware and housewares stores and in chain retailers like Target and Kmart.

Mr. Farber sold Oxo to the General Housewares Corporation in 1992. His later ventures included creating a line of kitchenware with his son John for the celebrity chef Mario Batali.

Samuel Farber was born in Manhattan on Nov. 16, 1924, and reared in Yonkers. Pots and pans were in his pedigree: an uncle, Simon Farber, founded the cookware maker Farberware on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1900. His father, Louis, helped found Farber Brothers, makers of glass and silver-plated serving ware.

During World War II, Mr. Farber served with the Army Air Forces in Turkey and North Africa. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard in 1946 and later joined his father’s business.

Mr. Farber, who lectured frequently about industrial design and received many awards in the field, was also a major collector of outsider art, including work by Henry Darger and Martín Ramírez.

As a board member of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, he helped secure the architectural firm Tod Williams, Billie Tsien & Associates to design the museum’s former home on West 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

Opened in 2001 and widely praised by critics, the building is now owned by its neighbor, the Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Farber’s first marriage, to Joan Levine, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Betsey Wells Kriegsman, whom he married in 1985, survivors include two sons from his first marriage, John and Thomas; two stepchildren, Mark Kriegsman and Sue Kriegsman; four granddaughters; and three step-granddaughters.

A longtime resident of Manhattan, Mr. Farber lived most recently in Lexington, Mass.

Today, Oxo is owned by Helen of Troy, a maker of personal care products. Its Good Grips line now comprises hundreds of items, including cleaning, gardening and barbecue tools.

All for the want of a painless peeler a quarter-century ago.

“It’s hard to think of a vegetable peeler as radical,” Mr. Farber told The Los Angeles Times in 2000. “But I guess it was.”

Mike Darnell, a Reality Show Creator, Is Leaving Fox

Mr. Darnell, who has supervised reality programming for Fox since before the term reality show entered the lexicon, said Friday that he was leaving the network at the end of the month.

He oversaw Fox’s most popular reality shows (“So You Think You Can Dance,” “MasterChef,” “The X Factor” in addition to “Idol”) and was also its most outlandish innovator (remember “Temptation Island” and “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?”).

Mr. Darnell and his superiors at Fox said that he was offered a new contract but decided to leave. Nonetheless, there was immediate speculation that he was a casualty of the tough television season at Fox, particularly with “American Idol.”

Fox’s audiences have fallen by more than 15 percent in the season that ends this month. For “Idol,” once the most popular show on American television, the fall has been steeper. While the slide is not necessarily surprising, since the show has been on for more than a decade, the ratings have been distressing for Fox and its parent company, News Corporation.

When the company reported first-quarter earnings, it said Fox’s ad revenue had declined in large part because of the performance of “Idol.” Now the network is contemplating a complete makeover of the show, possibly by replacing last season’s judges with a panel of “Idol” alumni like Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Hudson. Such a move would emphasize the past star-making success of the series.

On Friday there were reports that Ms. Hudson, a finalist on the third season of “Idol,” had signed on for the next season, which will start in January; Fox declined to comment.

Mr. Darnell, in a brief telephone interview, warmly recalled the days when “Idol” drew 30 million viewers a night and acknowledged that it would “never be as big as it once was.”

But no other series will be, either, he added: “I don’t think that’s possible in television anymore,” with the exception of a few one-time events like the Super Bowl. He expressed confidence about the future of “Idol,” drawing an analogy between it and the 35-year-old “Saturday Night Live” on NBC.

“How many times have you heard that ‘S.N.L.’ is dead?” he asked. “Then a new crop comes in and it’s a big success again.”

“There’s something about these brands,” he said, asserting that “the audience wants to like them.”

Mr. Darnell, whose title is president of alternative entertainment, gained notice in the TV world for his risk-taking and exuberance. But over-the-top reality TV shows are now less the domain of broadcast networks like Fox than of niche cable channels like TLC and A&E. Mr. Darnell has not had a particularly newsworthy show in quite some time. (Franchises he helped birth, however, like “MasterChef,” continue to gain viewers and inspire spinoffs.)

“He brilliantly paved the way for all of us, creating a powerful entertainment genre that audiences can’t get enough of,” said Ryan Seacrest, the host of “American Idol.”

Mr. Darnell, 51, joined the network in 1994 as the director of specials; among the most infamous of those was “Alien Autopsy (Fact or Fiction)” in 1995. In 2000, The New York Times called him “the Svengali of sometimes gruesome, sometimes comical specials that took television to new heights — or depths — of perversity.”

Mr. Darnell said he was leaving to pursue other opportunities, without elaborating. Fox executives emphasized that it was his choice. Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, said in a news release: “Mike took risks at a critical time and was a pioneering force in shaping the reality programming genre that exists today. He’s a smart and fearless executive who will be missed.”

Mr. Darnell, asked if his exit was related to “Idol’s” ratings weakness, said, “Of course not.”

“Every time my deal comes up, I go through this excruciating decision process,” he said, and this time he concluded he should leave.

“I was able to make this the Wild West,” he said, referring to Fox and its willingness to try stunt shows like “Man vs. Beast” and “World’s Scariest Police Chases.”

“But the Wild West has moved,” he added. “Cable, digital, it’s everywhere now.”

Putting “Idol” aside, he said his best show was “Joe Millionaire,” the 2003 dating competition that tricked female contestants into believing that the aforementioned Joe was a rich bachelor. Joe was actually a construction worker. About 35 million viewers tuned in for the finale.