A Discussion of Middling Importance: How to Fix MASTERCHEF

Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars #27

Hello, everyone! I trust you are all living lives of calmness and peace and tranquility, with no existential dread or constant anxiety churning away in the background like the endless white noise that comes of living near a busy highway. (Yeah, I know, but we all can dream, can’t we?)

And yes, it’s been another long while without one of these newsletters, because of no good reason I can fathom. I’ll once again say that I’m hoping to do better with these, but I will also again note that I’ve said that before, so as always, no promises. But since the last letter I’ve been doing a lot of work with photography, practicing both at home and “oot and aboot” as my Canadian friends probably don’t actually say but I’ll pretend that they do. I’ve been so heavily invested in photography, in fact, that I’ve only recently started to realize that photography has had a serious impact on my self-identity: I wrote on my blog just this past week about if I can even still consider myself a writer. Those thoughts took me to places that surprised me, even if I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. It’s amazing how often the biggest surprises in our lives are simply the elephants in the room that we’re finally forced to actually confront, isn’t it?

But that’s not the topic of this installment. I’ve been casting about for something to write about here, and one problem of my current desires for “content creation” is that I’m trying to figure out how it all goes together. What kind of content should be on the blog versus the Substack? What kind of content should be a video, and if a video, what kind should be a long-form YouTube video and which should be relegated to short Tiktoks or Instagram Reels? This is hard! I haven’t even come close to figuring any of this out. I have some thoughts, but no certainty as of yet. I do keep leaning against the idea of unique content in all phases of my online presence, which is to say, I don’t want anything I put on video to be the only type of content I put on video.

That’s probably enough rambling. Let’s get into some actual content by talking about…cooking competition shows! And one in particular.

I love cooking competition shows. They’re one of my “warm blanket” genres of “something on teevee”. Watching people cook competitively, with a big prize on the line, always excites me at least a little, because the competition isn’t physical (as much as I enjoy football and baseball, I certainly can’t relate to any of the players), and it involves something I know at least a bit about, and it’s watchable. I mean, watching someone cook when they know what they’re doing is invariably a fascinating delight. Watchability is important. This is why there are no “writing competition” shows. There’s MasterChef, but there’s no MasterNovelist, because nobody wants to watch people sitting at their keyboards typing.

There are also a lot of variations within the Cooking Competition Show genre itself. You have shows like Iron Chef, with its bizarre Japanese theatricality. There’s the comedic Is It Cake?, which makes a really fun and often gonzo baking competition out of that fad a few years back of making hyper-realistic cakes that look like something that’s nowhere near a cake until it’s sliced into (often dramatically, with a REALLY BIG KNIFE). I loved Cutthroat Kitchen, which encouraged strange sabotages amongst the chefs, limited the prize money available, put the prize money directly in the control of the contestant chefs, and—this was huge—crowned a winner each episode, so there was no “Who gets eliminated THIS week!” drama.

Right now, the Big Cheeses of Cooking Competition Shows are The Great British Bake-Off (often referenced as GBBO, even in America, where because of some trademark Pillsbury owns we’re supposed to call it The Great British Baking Show), which I love and may write about some other time, and several of the shows in what I’ve come to call the GRCU: Gordon Ramsay Cinematic Universe. Right now there’s a rotation of three competition shows, one of which is always in progress on FOX, each of which featuring Gordon Ramsay in one way or another: the venerable Hell’s Kitchen, which keeps trucking along; the new-kid-on-the-block Next Level Chef, which I think is the best of these shows because of its interesting concept; and the middle child, MasterChef, which just ended a month or so ago. HK runs in the fall, Next Level shows up in mid-winter, and MasterChef runs over the summer.

MasterChef’s format is simple: a group of “home cooks” is assembled through an audition phase, and then they are put through their paces on each episode, with at least one cook eliminated each week until a winner is crowned at the Finale (which used to feature two cooks going head-to-head, but now it’s three). The participants are people with no professional cooking experience, so often times they’re skilled but without the deep food knowledge that you would expect of a pro, so they’ll do very strange things sometimes with flavor combinations, or they’ll attempt a technique they don’t know, or the like. Of the GRCU shows, MasterChef tends to have the most “relatable” contestants on it: “My dream is to own my own food truck and serve the food of my heritage, if only I could break free from my day job at the bank,” is the kind of thing you hear a lot on this show. The season just concluded featured a home cook who is also a professional corn hole player. (I know nothing about how “professional corn hole” works. It’s not a thing I know anything about.)

Over the last few years, MasterChef has settled into routine; in fact, with the exception of “new kid on the block” show Next Level Chef, all of the GRCU shows have. The episodes alternate between a cooking challenge that takes place in studio, and one that takes place somewhere outside where the cooks are separated into two teams who then have to cook for 101 people (that number to avoid ties). The problem is that the challenges themselves are getting truly repetitious, and the cooks are being tasked with cooking less, with the loss of the elimination challenge.

Taking the latter issue first: In the “in studio” episodes, we usually have what’s called a “Mystery Box” challenge in which every chef’s station has a box on it containing secret stuff that they are then tasked with using to create a dish. The best dish is crowned the day’s winner and that person usually gets some kind of reward or advantage for the next go-round, while the worst dish is eliminated. Now, what used to happen is that the “main” cook of the Mystery Box stuff used to take about half the episode, we’d have a tasting and a winner crowned, and then the cooks with the worst dishes (as judged by our triple-headed monster of Ramsay and the two other hosts, currently Sanchez and Bastianich) would face each other in a new and intense challenge, the loser of which is eliminated from the show. This made for some pretty compelling viewing! I remember one such elimination challenge when the remaining cooks were tasked with preparing three perfect egg dishes in something like ten minutes, or three different souffles. Now, the elimination challenge has been itself eliminated, so the main cook has bloated out to the entire episode.

The same thing used to happen in the “Team cook” episodes: the “cooking for 101 people” thing would only take half an episode, and then it’s back to the studio for the losing team to face an elimination challenge. Now, though, there’s no challenge and the judges just eliminate someone from the losing team on the spot. The team cook episodes are never particularly interesting to begin with, because watching a group of people prepare 101 servings of the exact same dish isn’t especially compelling, and since the kinds of dishes being prepared are almost always the same: One team will grill some chicken, the other some steaks; or one team will make burgers and the other fried chicken sandwiches, or lather rinse repeat.

There are other challenges of a different variety that show up each season that were interesting at first, but less so the more you see them. There are two “cooking in pairs” challenges that happen each season: in one, the cooks are paired off and then each pair has to replicate a dish or two made by Ramsay, but only one of them cooks at a time, so the other one is shouting instructions. In the other, the cooks are again paired but tasked with picking a dish and then cooking identical servings of it, while being forced to work on either side of a big wall so they can’t actually see each other and can only shout to one another over the wall: “Put a dollop of the sauce at the 2:00 position on the plate!” “Put a what on the what? I can’t hear you!” The show invented this challenge during the 2020 season, when they were basically forced by COVID to stay in-studio for the whole season, and it was fun at first but it’s increasingly weird now. In what real-life cooking scenario are chefs having to shout over a barrier at one another?

And then there’s the “Restaurant Takeover”, in which the cooks have to run an actual kitchen in an actual restaurant during an “actual” service (I’m sure this is not a service with real paying customers, but maybe I’m wrong), with Ramsay running the service and yelling at them. I hate this episode each and every season, for one reason: This is why I watch Hell’s Kitchen. These aren’t professional chefs who came up through years of line cooking, and it’s invariably painful to watch them forced to act like it.

MasterChef has, for me, been “phoning it in” for the last few seasons, and it feels cheaper each time out. The cooking time has been reduced on most dishes to 45 minutes, which is absurd; compare that with GBBO’s “You have four hours to bake your twelve identical mini-cakes!” There needs to be more creativity returned to the show, and an embrace of the random creativity of the home cooks themselves. The elimination challenges used to provide the most fascinating viewing each week, like when a blind chef had to make an apple pie (she ended up winning the whole competition that year), or when one cook got to give some chefs live crabs while the others got canned, or another when each cook was allowed to pick out their own perfect ingredients for their own perfect dish…and then were forced to rotate their stations so each one ended up cooking something with someone else’s ingredients. MasterChef, unfortunately, feels padded and safe now. I’d like to see the show return to a more creative approach to the whole “cooking competition” thing.

But will I watch it again when it comes back in Late May, 2025? Yeah. I mean, even a worn-out blanket can be a comfort, and it will still be “something on teevee” for those nights when all I want is, well, something on teevee.

And with that, I sign out.

Exeunt,
—K.