As president of Alternative Entertainment at the Fox network and subsequently president of Unscripted Television at Warner Bros., Darnell was in charge of some of the most successful and longest-running franchises in television history,[1][2][3] including American Idol, The Bachelor franchise, The Voice, Family Guy, Futurama, Hell's Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, MasterChef, Little Big Shots, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, So You Think You Can Dance, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, The Simple Life, Temptation Island, and many more.
[4] Soon after graduating, he had an internship at Entertainment Tonight, which he says he "hated",[4] before he started working at Fox's West Coast flagship station KTTV, within their news department.
[8] Darnell became an executive at Fox in 1994, initially under the title "director of specials",[8] and during his 19 years at the network he rose through the ranks to become President of Alternative Entertainment.
As the network feared accusations of propagating a hoax, the show was broadcast with the title Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction; it drew an audience of nearly twelve million viewers and was rebroadcast several more times.
[9][10][11] At one point, he produced over sixty specials a year for Fox,[12] including: When Animals Attack!, World's Wildest Police Videos, Breaking the Magician's Code: Magic's Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed, and Man vs Beast.
[14] Darnell told Variety that his proudest achievements during his time at Fox included American Idol, the success he had with Gordon Ramsay, and the season finale of Joe Millionaire, which drew about forty million viewers, outranking that year's Academy Awards, and became the network's most-viewed entertainment telecast.
[19] In 2021, Darnell launched the much-anticipated Friends: The Reunion, rebuilding the sets and bringing the whole cast back together at Warner Bros Stage 24 where the original show was filmed.