Rant/Review
The words emitting from my keyboard yesterday in regards to Lost were joyous. Enthusiastic. I really like that show and I look forward to it each week. I even get a little bummed out when the repeat-streak comes.
Let me quickly set about deflating any of that happy, positive vibe before it starts to spread. The only thing we like to spread around here is vitriol.
Oh, and jam. But that’s a whole other deal.
Top Chef
Nik and I started watching a couple of dumb shows that came on around the same time. One is Top Chef and the other is The Next Food Network Star. Now, both shows are ostensibly about finding out which of a pool of candidates is best suited to have their culinary skills put on display. The execution of each is night and day.
I’m not even going to bother “reviewing” The Next Food Network Star. It’s a decent show that has a fairly likeable ensemble who seem to be cordial to each other even if they are technically in competition and it works as both a reality contest and a sort of backstage look at the staple Food Network shows. They don’t focus on forced interpersonal drama and the prize being offered is clearly one of obvious tangible value. I’ll keep watching it.
Top Chef, on the other hand, is an unmitigated disaster of a TV show that I’m almost inclined to carry on with it just to have the object lesson of how not to execute a reality show—or for that reason any style of TV show. It is only the fact that I have zero interest in ever actually creating a reality show that prevents me from persuing this particular lesson.
First of all, they focus almost entirely on the drama between the differing personalities of the chefs/contestants. In case you haven’t heard me say it before, I have no problem repeating myself: The absolute worst, most un-entertaining, deplorable part about “reality” TV is the constant bickering, arguing, intelligence-deprived raving we’re subjected to that is I guess supposed to approximate drama. Actually it’s like listening to cats fight: All sound and fury with no real purpose but to annoy the crap out of anyone in earshot. And this is 85% of the show.
A large part of this negativity comes from them having cast The World’s Most Unlikeable Contestants featuring six of the seven character traits most likely to cause spontaneous migranes followed by blackouts and vast chasms of lost time leading to bewildering arrests and insanity pleas. I mean, that Steven guy? That simply must be an act for the camera because I simply cannot believe in a world where someone that repulsive and supererogatorily smug finds a way to function in society. Anyone I ever met that took themselves so seriously as to suggest that they might be unfamiliar with a hot dog due to its base nature would, by definition, require ejection into the void of space. “I’m accustomed to four-star dining,” indeed.
But you know, I watch Survivor (against my better judgement, but that has yet to stop me for longer than one season) so I’m pretty familiar with the “repugnant fame-seekers” routine here. I may not like it, I may gripe about it incessantly, but I can cope with it. What I cannot abide by is the utterly asinine and completely farcical nature of this so-called competition.
To recap, the prize at stake here is $100,000, a full line of high-end kitchen applicances, a write-up in a respected culinary magazine and a job catering a high-profile event. For a budding chef, this is pretty huge I’d imagine. You would think, with so much riding on the line, that the producers of the show would make an effort to try and both cast people of roughly equal skill and then follow that up by creating fair and reasonable tasks for them to compete in which would allow the judges to fairly identify which was most deserving.
Apparently that never entered anyone’s mind in setting up these “challenges,” or even the premise of the show itself.
First of all, each show has two competitions, the “Quickfire” challenge which is a fairly short test of some kind where the winner is given immunity (using Survivor parlance) from the second elimination challenge in the second half of the show. The first flaw in the logic starts right there because while having immunity prevents a contestant from being booted, the person who is eliminated is the person who performs the worst in the challenge. So if the person who won the Quickfire challenge performs poorly in the elimination challenge, the eliminated contestant is the second worst person, which is a pretty massive injustice to begin with. But that ignores the fact that you have a negative contest, which in and of itself is a very poor game mechanic. Think about it this way: They give one player the title of “winner” from each elimination challenge. But it means nothing. Literally, nothing happens from winning. It is only the ultimate loser who suffers which means that the contest becomes (once you factor in the immunity granted from the Quickfire challenge) “be at least the third worst.”
Put another way, you are only ever—ever—competing to be better than just two other contestants.
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