NOTE: This essay originally appeared in a slightly different form on The Huffington Post.
Top Chef is good, but it isn’t genius, and last night’s episode–which I’m dubbing “Smoked Pork Christmas” —proved why.
In a nutshell, the show needs to get over itself.
I’ll explain what I mean… after the jump.
Let’s begin with the premise that no Bravo reality competition is all that important. Entertaining? Yes. Addictive? Obviously. But really, it’s just people sewing dresses or designing living rooms. Or making food.
The other series in this family embrace their campiness. Tim Gunn’s very demeanor reminds us it’s all kind of silly, and when Shear Genius asks contestants to make real people look like Marge Simpson, you realize the producers know the score.
Now, I’m not saying fashion design and hair styling are silly per se. I don’t think that at all. But everything becomes ludicrous when it’s the theme of a reality competition. Take obesity: It’s a life-or-death problem, but when the folks on The Biggest Loser stand weeping on a giant scale, flanked by judges and ceremonial objects, their plight is encrusted by the ridiculous.
But no one on Top Chef acknowledges that. The show is so stone-faced you’d think entire nations were going to rise on fall based on the freshness of a scallop.
More to the point, Top Chef forces the same ridiculous crap down our throats as every other reality series, but it never lets anyone admit for even a moment how foolish and manipulated it is.
In “Smoked Pork Christmas,” for instance, we see an early scene of Hosea talking to his sister on a personal communication device that I’m calling a Cohort. While Hosea asks her about their cancer-ridden father, we get a tight close-up not of his face, but of the product. It’s such a baldly tasteless moment that I groaned when I saw it.
Yet the entire scene is played as though Hosea is the star. At least on Project Runway, you can hear the wink in Tim Gunn’s voice when he mentions the Bluefly.com accessory wall. At least when we were learning about Korto’s terrified flight from Africa, she wasn’t sitting on an inflatable Target chair.
But as revolting as it can be, the product placement makes sense: The sponsors are footing the bill. However, Top Chef is just as humorless about things that don’t even matter.
Like, does anyone believe the Christmas episode was filmed at Christmastime? We see shots of contestants walking around in shorts, for God’s sake. Yet the producers dress the set with garland, bring in the Harlem Gospel Choir to sing a carol, and force everyone to wish each other happy holidays. It’s just like the Thanksgiving episode, when everyone was cooking outside. In November. In Rochester. The night that show aired, I looked up the weather in Rochester, and it was below freezing. Yet as they were stirring up stuffing under the clear night sky, the chefs just swore they had that Thanksgiving feeling.
With a light touch, this faux-holiday spirit could be charming. If someone had pointed out that it’s crazily awesome to see a gospel choir in kente cloth singing “12 Days of Christmas” in front of an industrial stove, then the show could have kept it’s grip on reality.
Instead, we saw rapt reactions and people getting chills as some guy went melisma-crazy about a partridge in a pear tree.
By playing everything so straight, the show creates the impression that it has a lesson to teach. By showing contestants helping each other in the name of Christmas, Top Chef presents itself as a moral arbiter and not some goofy reality show on extended cable.
Even worse, the show suggests its audience is too stupid to realize what’s going on. As though we’re sitting there, jaws agape, waiting to be enlightened by Radhika’s message of forgiveness.
To further insult us, “Smoked Pork Christmas” also has the guest judge act like she’s spontaneously deciding to give the entire cast a copy of her book. She even says it’s their reward them for helping each other through a difficult challenge.
And look: I don’t begrudge anyone their efforts to move their product, and I doubt this woman believed she was doing a great act of charity by going on TV to plug her book. But by framing her as the Mother Teresa of recipes, the producers made the author and Top Chef itself nauseating.
Sanctimony also infects the judges. My favorite thing about this season of Top Design was the sassy interplay between India Hicks and Jonathan Adler. They actually had fun together, like when Michael, Nina, and Heidi cut up after someone sends a tacky disaster down the runway.
But over in the kitchen? It’s doom and gloom and “I am very disappointed in you.”
I’ll grant immunity to Padma Lakshmi, because she seems so lovely and supportive, but where does Tom Colicchio get off? He comes across as so blinded by his own arrogance that he actually gets angry about a deviled egg.
Of course, this could all be the magic of editing. Maybe it’s yuks galore backstage and Tom Colicchio is the jolliest clown. But if that’s the case, why frame the show this way? Why is it better for Top Chef to be so full of itself?
My boyfriend Andrew makes the interesting point that the series is the least gay of Bravo’s Big Four. Fashion, hair styling, and interior design just naturally attract more homos, so maybe their respective series have a more inherent sense of camp. I mean, if the Harlem Gospel Choir shows up on Project Runway, you’d better believe that some queen is jumping in to sing along… possibly Tim Gunn.
So maybe Top Chef’s sensibility is just too “straight.” Maybe it needs an intrinsic queer element to loosen it up. And I say “intrinsic” because the “Team Rainbow” thing was obviously a manufactured sop to gay fans.
And whatever: Maybe you can’t survive in a real restaurant if you’re overly campy, but Top Chef isn’t real. So pull out the glitter, Colicchio, and make me a cake with sparkles.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Lucas // Dec 18, 2008 at 3:38 am
Great critique, Mark.
I agree. They act like the fate of the world depends on all of this. A little whimsy here and there might make it all more palatable.
Also, so right about underestimating the audience. We called “the surprise Christmas present” ending about a 1/3 of the way in, and I think that’s just because we’re slow.
2 Brian Benda // Dec 18, 2008 at 3:46 am
Do the producers of Top Chef realize that Padma has a gigantic scar the size of the Amazon on her left arm? And why do they insist on always featuring that side of her so prominently? I am thrilled she is comfortable with it, but seems like they could get a better camera angle.
3 Kingoftunes // Dec 18, 2008 at 4:42 am
As a general rule, I do not like reality shows. There is nothing “real” about them and anyone who is familiar with the genre is by now very aware of how things are edited to shape the narrative. However, I enjoy Top Chef the most out of all of them because the contestants, by and large, take this seriously. There is real talent involved in being a great chef. It’s nice to see a reality show focus more on the process and on contestants that have to display an actual skill. It’s cool that the judges want to push the contestants to get the best out of them. Let the other Bravo shows provide the camp (and I do love my Project Runaway!). But it’s also nice to have a show that plays it “straight”, so to speak. If Bravo is the gay channel, then Top Chef (and Tom) are the bears to Project Runway’s fab drag queen.
4 Kay // Dec 18, 2008 at 10:03 am
Padma’s scar comes from a terrible car accident that she and her family were in when she was 14. Evidently she’s very open about it and doesn’t like to hide it.
5 Michael // Dec 18, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Agreed on all counts–but this is morally complicated stuff, Mr. B. You see, I blame Mark Blankenship and The Critical Condition for even convincing me to tune in to Bravo’s reality competition series in the first place (and by now it’s clear that some of them will NEVER cut it with me), so I have the strange experience of reading this blog entry as an internicene battle: in my mind, Blankenship and Bravo conspired together to make me watch Top Chef and thus to return to the dismal karma of high school gym class abuse and bad after-dinner lectures from my father (yes, I’m talking about you, Tom Callichio). So, too late, Mark: you’re a promoter of these shows and in the case of Top Chef you owe me an apology and a ride on the ferris wheel to raise my spirits.
More seriously: it is my minor and distant experience with the food service industry and restaurant kitchens that they are absolutely humorless places with every detail holding the urgency of a NASA launch: is there ANY cooking show (especially in a restaurant setting) that seems light-hearted? I think if you draw judges from that world and set the competition up in a restaurant style setting, you’re inviting the spirit of military discipline and ritual humiliation. If you asked these people to lighten up they would blink at you in incomprehension; it’s asking ice to burn.
The alternative is the charming-person-in-a-kitchen-chatting-with-you-while-cooking show, which has always had its appeal and seems much closer to the actual sensual pleasures and improvisational fun of cooking and eating. (I’ll take Saint Julia Child the Tipsy and those woefully misguided Fat Ladies over mega-fantasy girlfriend Rachael Ray any day, but the premise is the same.) The question would be if there’s any way to get that spirit into a competition–even if that means morphing the show as the number of contestants decreases.
It also wouldn’t hurt if just once somebody made food I recognize and/or would like to try; I’ve never heard such bizarre combinations of ingredients in my life, and can never imagine the taste. A BIG problem in a cooking show, wouldn’t you think?
And somebody find them a different word than “deconstructed” when they mean something like reorganized.
6 michelle @ TNS // Dec 18, 2008 at 6:30 pm
i’m so with you. has the fate of the free world ever hung on a scallop? i mean, someone correct me if it has, but i tend to think no.
i’ve been a loyal TC viewer since the first season and i still watch and have even started liveblogging. but the seriousness is making is really hard to say anything amusing.
the show needs a tim gunn. i vote for jacques pepin.
7 Mark Blankenship // Dec 18, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Michael — As always, a brilliant analysis, especially about the difference between a kitchen show and a host show. I think there must be a way to combine the two.
And I also agree with you about making reconginzable food. For me, Ariane’s Today Show victory with a simple salad was really heartening because as the hosts said, “Good is good.” I am not someone who wants to enjoy food intellectually, which is why I also shudder at “deconstructed” TC dishes. Give me six kinds of deviled eggs any day!
8 In L.A. // Dec 19, 2008 at 1:59 am
Excellent post! While watching the show, I had thought, “Is it just me or is this show reaching maximum campiness?” I see that I was not alone.
One last item about your ‘Big 4′ – Tom Colicchio is actually a gay man – Bravo is still in touch.
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