I have become
obsessed with reality television. Now
before you pick up your large rocks and prepare to hurl them in my general
direction, hear me out. You see, I am not
just obsessed with every show that is supposedly unscripted. No, that would just be stupid. I am obsessed with reality cooking
shows.
Be they
competitions or one of the roughly 8324 Gordon Ramsey vehicles currently on the
air, I cannot get enough of watching real people with huge egos fuck up
constantly.
Between Hell's Kitchen, Master Chef, Chopped and The Taste, I devoured roughly 10 seasons
of these reality TV in the last 30 days.
Seriously, I forgot what the outside looked like for an entire weekend
at one point. Throw in Hotel Hell, Kitchen Nightmares, and ManVs. Food and I may never want to go
outside again.
But why???
I honestly
have no idea. I believe that part of it
is the aforementioned egos, most especially in the competition shows. I fucking hate big egos. But how do you judge if someone on Survivor should go or not? Certainly it's not talent. You don't have to be talented to be on that
show, you just have to try not to be an idiot.
On cooking competitions, people who have legitimate talent within their
field have been chosen to compete.
That's what separates these cooking competitions apart: they have at
least a decent amount of demonstrable talent.
(This is probably why I also enjoy watching the ScyFy show Face/Off.)
In all these
cooking competitions, we start off with 12+ aspiring chefs who have to make it
through the preliminaries based on their talents alone (ok, we all know that's
bullshit, producers also like people who will help garner ratings. But still,
they have some talent). Then they're
thrown together and encouraged to talk shit and talk themselves up. You can tell some of them aren't very fond of
it while others can't get enough of themselves.
Oh, those are the ones that I love to see fail. I gain such an immense amount of
schadenfreude from their failures. The
larger the mouth, the happier I am to see them go.
But it's not
just that. It's because of the
cooking. Cooking is something anyone can
do decently with some practice. I've
honestly never met someone who just could
not cook. I truly believe those
people do not exist. Cooking, to me, is
like driving. Anyone can do it, not
everyone can do it well. That's the
other thing that sets these shows apart.
For Face/Off you need some
serious talent to hone. The same goes
for singing competitions; not everyone can sing. With the cooking competitions, I'm suddenly
watching a show that I could be a part of if I was motivated.
The same goes
for the reality entertainment shows like Kitchen
Nightmares. Here are people doing
something I could legitimately see myself or a friend doing. Not that I want to own a kitchen, but it's
something that could be learned through work and schooling. I can't just magically become a teen mom or a
Jersey douchebag. I can't magically
become a sports super-star. But I could
totally be a floundering businessman with a failing dream and a lack of
motivation.
There it
is. That's why getting Hulu is possibly
one of the worst things I've ever done from a work ethic standpoint. I still haven't mounted my TV on the wall
because I'm too busy watching episode after episode, season after season of
people who I could actually aspire to be running around a kitchen and getting
yelled at by their betters.
Also, that's
why there's no movie review today.
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