Watched season 2 of
Top Chef over the weekend. It's a frustrating show to watch, in some ways. Yay for food, and yay for a competition that's actually about making stuff and mastery of a skill; but the people making the show don't share that confidence, and they keep pointing the cameras away from the food and toward the people.
Whom they stir into the pettiest of dramas. "O noes somebody's cheating let's all wear our serious faces!" Except, for fuck's sake, they've got someone standing there pointing the camera at somebody who's sneaking a free bag of fruit; why don't they tell them to put the damn thing back and let the game continue? It's embarassing.
I do like the long-form game show, though, particularly when it's one of these crafty things where it takes a while to get a sense of the individual players' styles. They haven't quite shaken off the legacy of
Survivor, though, down to the protection-from-elimination/elimination cycles and the interviews with people where they say "I'm not here to make friends, I'm here to win."
None of that is necessary! In particular, you can see them chafing against the need to knock somebody out each week, when a strong challenger stumbles (hit in a weakness--for fuck's sake, how many times do we have to hear "well, I'm not a pastry chef"?--or just messing up while under one of the fairly severe constraints) and they have to hem and haw and judge somebody else's thing worst just to keep them around.
As I mentioned, the show's greatest weakness is, ironically, in its craftsmanship; it's bad at showing you the act of cooking, it's bad at showing you the final product, it doesn't trust your memory to survive commercial breaks or the gap between shows (and the resulting repetition is in fact more harmful to comprehension when viewed continuously, with commercials removed). It's still fun, though.
Also, in case you missed it:
lightning vs. volcano.