Rant/Review

But it gets even better. Assuming that was simply the case, you still might have a decent competition if the playing field remained level. But it doesn’t. For starters the contestants range from a twentysomething ex-model trying to start a new career who has practically negative real world chefing experience to competitors who have owned and operating their own restaurants for years. The above mentioned Steven isn’t even a chef, but rather a Sommelier. It turns out he does have at least a modicum of cooking skill but he could have easily spent the whole show just handing the judges various glasses of wine. Even if you assume that it would be more or less impossible to get a group of chefs who were of roughly equal skill and experience, you would have to at least assume that the challenges themselves were balanced, right?

Bzzzt.

Consider the most recent episode. The contestants were divided into teams of two. Now, right off the bat that’s a suspect condition because remember we’re trying to decide which individual chef is worthy of a massive reward and now we have them working with randomly drawn partners which, if improperly paired, might result in someone’s dismissal due to any number of non-cooking-skill related factors (managerial miscues, personality conflicts, poor performance by the teammate, etc). If that weren’t bad enough, the challenge was to create street food that fused two distinct culinary styles. The common thread was that all had “Latin cuisine” as one of the styles. In the interest of fairness I would assume the other style would be identical across the board. Nope. Instead there were as many different secondary styles as there were teams.

When you note that one of the styles was Japanese while another was Moroccan you realize that there is simply no way that the results of the contest could be fairly and accurately compared, much less quantified into some sort of heirarchal structure. On top of all this there is a different “celebrity” judge each week, usually a respected local chef from a restaurant in San Francisco where the show is filmed. But this too is another problem because these chefs are under (apparently) no direction to keep their opinions limited to the taste of the food; rather they judge contestants (in turn) by their attitudes, their execution of the specifics of the challenge, their personalities, their choice of ingredients or any other thing they might choose to use as criteria. In one case last episode the guest judge remarked a number of times that he absolutely loved a particular kind of pork, which one of the teams had just happened to use. A happy coincidence but one wonders if the team in question might have suffered if a different judge who did not care for the dish had been involved.

I realize that these types of shows are not exactly fair. Survivor isn’t fair. But the one thing about Survivor and its clones is that at least of the ones I’ve seen they manage to stay internally consistent. The biggest clue that Top Chef can’t even manage to work within its own context? Each contestant has, at one point or another, been among the lower tier of the players at elimination time and facing a potential punting from the show. Explain to me how you can award someone a title and a prize if at some point in your own competition designed to find the best, they (in theory at least) had performed poorly enough to warrant ejection from the game?

Flicks

I’ve caught a couple of movies this week. Among them are The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Derailed. Narnia is fantastic (it is difficult for me to pry my fond childhood memories of the Narnia stories when my dad read them aloud to my brother and I from that idealized context, but fortunately the movie doesn’t make me need to) and Nik actually bought me the two-disc extended collector’s edition. I’m pretty happy that worked out well.

Derailed, though, is a mess. I had zero expectations going in, even not knowing what genere it fell under. In spite of this handicap I had the movie’s plot, twist and outcome nailed within twenty minutes and was actively annoyed when the plot of the whole movie hinges on the lead character acting like a complete simpleton twice in the span of ten minutes. Do yourself a favor and miss this movie.

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