Next Iron Chef is a show similar to Top Chef where a number of skilled chefs compete in cooking competitions with one or two chefs being eliminated every episode until there's a final winner. The difference lies in the nature of the challenges and the stakes. The challenges are almost universally individual ones, with the team challenges that are Top Chef's bread and butter being once a season affairs on Next Iron Chef, if that. Also, rather than a bunch of cooking products and a stack of cash, what's at stake on Next Iron Chef is a place on Iron Chef: America's cast as a new Iron Chef.
The odd thing is that I prefer the competition to become an Iron Chef, more than I do Iron Chef: America itself. I suspect that's because there is so many fewer variables in Iron Chef: America than there are on Next Iron Chef. On the regular Iron Chef, each contestant, usually one Iron Chef versus an outside challenger, is told in advance that the secret ingredient is one of four possibilities. That allows each chef to have a pre-planned menu designed, making all about the final execution. Iron Chef contestants also get a pair of sous chefs to help them with the cooking. While that does allow for much more complex and artistic dishes, it also removes a lot of the spontaneity from the proceedings.
By comparison, Next Iron Chef is pretty diverse. You get wacky ingredients, or strange locations, or odd restrictions, or sometimes more than one of the above. I mean, really, who doesn't love watching persnickety Chopped judge Geoffrey Zakarian running for his life through a ballpark desperately trying to find some kind of ingredients to use before having to cook them on a grill set up in the bleachers? No one. It was hilarious.
What's more, the fourth season of Next Iron Chef added a new wrinkle, the Secret Ingredient Showdown. In the first three seasons of the show, matters proceeded similarly to Top Chef, where you'd have a preliminary challenge, the winner of whom gets an advantage in the second challenge. In the second challenge, the chef who did the worst is eliminated from the show. Starting with season four, however, the first challenge determines who the two worst chefs are, and those two get a single, often wacky, ingredient to play with. Best chef sticks around, worst goes home. Also, the winner of the first challenge gets some kind of edge in the first challenge of the next episode.
The fourth season also added a subtitle: Next Iron Chef: Super Chefs. In previous seasons, they'd usually included a reasonably well known chef, at least in TV Cooking circles. Season two had Amanda Freitag, who also serves as a judge on Chopped. Season three had Ming Tsai of Simply Ming fame. Season four, however, went nuts with the idea. Every single contestant either had their own cooking show either on Food Network, the Cooking Channel, or elsewhere, or else had at least appeared as a challenger on Iron Chef America. TheFood Network raided their own pantry pretty heavily for this season, with Zakarian, Guarnascelli, and Samuelson from Chopped, Burrell, MacMillan, and Irvine from Worst Cooks in America among other shows, making it six out of ten contestants being regulars on their own network! Still, like the Chopped All Stars competition before it, that ended up being a net positive as I for one found it fun to see people who are normally positioned as judges being on the other end of the judgments.
Thus, Next Iron Chef. It's only on for a few weeks every year, so it becomes a rare televised pleasure. If you happen to be watching Food Network in the autumn, you could do much worse than Next Iron Chef.
This concludes my Competitive TV series. But wait, what about the frequently mentioned Chopped? As it turns out, I wrote something about that show a few months ago and nothing's really changed. Go read that installment, and I'll move on to other topics. Thanks for reading.
Showing posts with label Competitive TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Competitive TV. Show all posts
Monday, January 16, 2012
Saturday, January 14, 2012
WEP '12, Day 14 - Competitive TV Part 3, Top Chef
Like Around the Horn, Top Chef is a show I've come to pretty late in the day. Now in its ninth season with a number of spin off shows, Top Chef is a competitive cooking show where chefs compete with one another through a number of challenges. One chef is eliminated every week until only three remain, then the final three fight it our for a big cash prize with other bennies.
It's kind of funny, because this season is the first I've seen from the very beginning and not just in reruns, and this is the season where they've changed things up. This season they've introduced the "Last Chance Kitchen" where the eliminated chef competes with a previous eliminated chef, with the winner getting to compete against the next eliminated chef and so on until the end when the final winner gets another chance at the main competition. The Last Chance Kitchen is available on the Bravo.com website.
The main show starts with a quick individual challenge where the winner often wins immunity from being eliminated in that episode. Then there's a team challenge where the member of the losing team who did the worst as decided by the judges is eliminated from the show.
This show is interesting because failure of your teammates can lead to your demise. The current Last Chance champion, Nyesha, got really screwed by the fact that they were doing a very rare Double Elimination, so she got eliminated because her partner Dakota screwed up.
They also focus more on other skills that a chef should have. For example, when they do the Restaurant Wars challenge, the teams have to decorate and run a restaurant in 24 hours. So things like decor and speed of service come up in a way that you don't see in most other cooking shows, though you can see some of that on Hell's Kitchen.
Overall, then, I find TopChef to be pretty fun and, even though it's probably my least favorite of the three cooking shows I'm covering for the Competitive TV series.
It's kind of funny, because this season is the first I've seen from the very beginning and not just in reruns, and this is the season where they've changed things up. This season they've introduced the "Last Chance Kitchen" where the eliminated chef competes with a previous eliminated chef, with the winner getting to compete against the next eliminated chef and so on until the end when the final winner gets another chance at the main competition. The Last Chance Kitchen is available on the Bravo.com website.
The main show starts with a quick individual challenge where the winner often wins immunity from being eliminated in that episode. Then there's a team challenge where the member of the losing team who did the worst as decided by the judges is eliminated from the show.
This show is interesting because failure of your teammates can lead to your demise. The current Last Chance champion, Nyesha, got really screwed by the fact that they were doing a very rare Double Elimination, so she got eliminated because her partner Dakota screwed up.
They also focus more on other skills that a chef should have. For example, when they do the Restaurant Wars challenge, the teams have to decorate and run a restaurant in 24 hours. So things like decor and speed of service come up in a way that you don't see in most other cooking shows, though you can see some of that on Hell's Kitchen.
Overall, then, I find TopChef to be pretty fun and, even though it's probably my least favorite of the three cooking shows I'm covering for the Competitive TV series.
WEP '12, Day 13 - Competitive TV Part 2, Around the Horn
Well, crap. Looks like I hit Save instead of Publish last night. Friday the 13th, indeed.
Despite this show being around since 2002, I've only started watching Around the Horn regularly in the last few years. The show of "competitive banter" features a host, Tony Reali, and four sports journalists. The journalists express their opinions of the major sports news of the day before, and Reali gives them points based on how clever and persuasive they were in their arguments. Periodically, one of the competitors is booted from the show for being too far behind. The last two standing have a one on one showdown, and the winner gets 25 seconds at the end of the show to say whatever they want, excepting what you can't say due to FCC regulations.
And that's it. Unlike most of the shows I'll be discussing in this series, there's really no long term for Around the Horn. There's no cash being passed around, except as salaries to the people on the show. Being eliminated first just means you get less face time that episode. They keep track of who's scored the most points, but that's just for bragging rights, and the current champion, Denver journalist Woody Paige, got his 71 points because he scored a 40 point bonus for being the only one on the show, and maybe on ESPN overall, to pick the Broncos to beat the Steelers last week.
As much as I enjoy the show for the competition, it also lets me see the top twelve topics in sports without having to sit through the usual Sports Center type hype show. Plus you even get the occasional insightful point or funny line. In truth, this isn't a show for everyone, but if you like banter and sports, you could do much worse than Around the Horn.
Despite this show being around since 2002, I've only started watching Around the Horn regularly in the last few years. The show of "competitive banter" features a host, Tony Reali, and four sports journalists. The journalists express their opinions of the major sports news of the day before, and Reali gives them points based on how clever and persuasive they were in their arguments. Periodically, one of the competitors is booted from the show for being too far behind. The last two standing have a one on one showdown, and the winner gets 25 seconds at the end of the show to say whatever they want, excepting what you can't say due to FCC regulations.
And that's it. Unlike most of the shows I'll be discussing in this series, there's really no long term for Around the Horn. There's no cash being passed around, except as salaries to the people on the show. Being eliminated first just means you get less face time that episode. They keep track of who's scored the most points, but that's just for bragging rights, and the current champion, Denver journalist Woody Paige, got his 71 points because he scored a 40 point bonus for being the only one on the show, and maybe on ESPN overall, to pick the Broncos to beat the Steelers last week.
As much as I enjoy the show for the competition, it also lets me see the top twelve topics in sports without having to sit through the usual Sports Center type hype show. Plus you even get the occasional insightful point or funny line. In truth, this isn't a show for everyone, but if you like banter and sports, you could do much worse than Around the Horn.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
WEP '12, Day 12 - Competitive TV Part 1: The Amazing Race
It's come to my attention that the only TV I really go out of my way to make time for these days are competitive shows. The Amazing Race, The Next Iron Chef, Around the Horn, Top Chef, and Chopped. The astute among you will note that that's also three competitive cooking shows out of five. Let's have a look at the shows in chronological order and see what I think of them and why you might like them. We'll start with The Amazing Race.
The Amazing Race has been the gold standard of reality shows for quite some time. Survivor may be both older and more popular, but The Amazing Race is simply better. The show follows a number of teams of two in a race around the world. Each team has a pre-existing relationship, be it friends, family, lovers, and so on. Each episode usually represents a single leg of the race and, with some exceptions, the last team to arrive at that leg's destination is eliminated from the race. This goes on from episode to episode until, in the finale, there are three teams left. The first team to reach the finish line splits one million dollars.
I'm a big fan of the show, even though I've missed around half of its nineteen seasons, as the show does two seasons a year. For me, it represents the best of the competitive shows. That's because that while a strong relationship with your partner or with your competitors can help, having a bad relationship doesn't mean you're doomed. In other words, victory or defeat is purely about whether or not you make it over the finish line before the other teams. There's no tribal councils, no alliances to vote people off, no votes from the audience at home. Get across the line first and you win. Get across the line last and you lose. There's nothing in-between. And that alone makes for a more interesting show to me.
With the show entering its twentieth season, I recently watched a copy of the first season on DVD. The differences are instructive. The show was harder back then. The tasks you had to overcome were more challenging, and the clues as to how to get from place to place generally less clear cut. Furthermore, the spreading of smartphones makes it a lot easier to just get your taxi driver to look up directions to a place you've never heard of, which was something you really couldn't do back in 2001 when the show debuted.
The show was more tactical, too. In the first season there was a Fast Forward on every leg of the race except the last one. The first team to get to a Fast Forward could use it to skip all tasks and go straight to the finish line of that leg. But a team could only use the Fast Forward once in the race, so it was a big deal to decide to go for it. Furthermore, if you went for it but another team beat you to it, you could end up even further behind, as the Fast Forward is usually well off the race route. Nowadays, however, there's only one or two Fast Forwards in each race, so you might as well grab it when you can. So the teams in the lead, who don't really need it, usually grab the Fast Forward and pad their leads, while the teams who are behind don't even bother since it's almost certainly gone by the time they get there.
The show has gotten better in some ways, though. The inclusion of the U-Turn, a once or twice per race opportunity to force another team to go back and do another task before they can move on, allows teams to go on the offensive in a way that wasn't available in the early races. The production values are better, and the fact that they've done this for 11 years shows in how they schedule tasks. It isn't possible for a team to get an eleven hour lead like one team did in the first Race, and damned difficult for a team to get a full 24 hours behind the others the way one team did in that race too.
So even though I'm not sure the modern version of the race is particularly better than the 2001 version, I'll still be there when the show comes back next month for the twentieth season.
The world is waiting...
EDIT: It occurs to me that I've already discussed Chopped on this blog. Things haven't changed such that the old entry is invalid, so you can read it here.
The Amazing Race has been the gold standard of reality shows for quite some time. Survivor may be both older and more popular, but The Amazing Race is simply better. The show follows a number of teams of two in a race around the world. Each team has a pre-existing relationship, be it friends, family, lovers, and so on. Each episode usually represents a single leg of the race and, with some exceptions, the last team to arrive at that leg's destination is eliminated from the race. This goes on from episode to episode until, in the finale, there are three teams left. The first team to reach the finish line splits one million dollars.
I'm a big fan of the show, even though I've missed around half of its nineteen seasons, as the show does two seasons a year. For me, it represents the best of the competitive shows. That's because that while a strong relationship with your partner or with your competitors can help, having a bad relationship doesn't mean you're doomed. In other words, victory or defeat is purely about whether or not you make it over the finish line before the other teams. There's no tribal councils, no alliances to vote people off, no votes from the audience at home. Get across the line first and you win. Get across the line last and you lose. There's nothing in-between. And that alone makes for a more interesting show to me.
With the show entering its twentieth season, I recently watched a copy of the first season on DVD. The differences are instructive. The show was harder back then. The tasks you had to overcome were more challenging, and the clues as to how to get from place to place generally less clear cut. Furthermore, the spreading of smartphones makes it a lot easier to just get your taxi driver to look up directions to a place you've never heard of, which was something you really couldn't do back in 2001 when the show debuted.
The show was more tactical, too. In the first season there was a Fast Forward on every leg of the race except the last one. The first team to get to a Fast Forward could use it to skip all tasks and go straight to the finish line of that leg. But a team could only use the Fast Forward once in the race, so it was a big deal to decide to go for it. Furthermore, if you went for it but another team beat you to it, you could end up even further behind, as the Fast Forward is usually well off the race route. Nowadays, however, there's only one or two Fast Forwards in each race, so you might as well grab it when you can. So the teams in the lead, who don't really need it, usually grab the Fast Forward and pad their leads, while the teams who are behind don't even bother since it's almost certainly gone by the time they get there.
The show has gotten better in some ways, though. The inclusion of the U-Turn, a once or twice per race opportunity to force another team to go back and do another task before they can move on, allows teams to go on the offensive in a way that wasn't available in the early races. The production values are better, and the fact that they've done this for 11 years shows in how they schedule tasks. It isn't possible for a team to get an eleven hour lead like one team did in the first Race, and damned difficult for a team to get a full 24 hours behind the others the way one team did in that race too.
So even though I'm not sure the modern version of the race is particularly better than the 2001 version, I'll still be there when the show comes back next month for the twentieth season.
The world is waiting...
EDIT: It occurs to me that I've already discussed Chopped on this blog. Things haven't changed such that the old entry is invalid, so you can read it here.
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