Via: Tuned In
Back when Top Chef was getting under way, some people–I may have been one of them but will baldfacedly deny it–suggested that cooking could not translate to reality TV the way that singing (American Idol) and fashion (Project Runway) did. Sound and visuals come across on TV; flavor does not, so viewers could never feel like they could join in “judging” a prepared dish. Those doubters, which I am still going to pretend did not include me, turned out to be wrong, of course, and they ignored the entire history of TV’s ability to induce salivation with nothing more than images and some lush description. Food was good enough on its own–appealing enough, tempting enough and exciting enough–to provide plenty of reality-TV drama without having to pretend to be something else. Top Chef was a hit (as Iron Chef was before it), and plenty of food competitions have followed. ABC’s The Taste, which debuted last night, aims to be another of those shows, but it begins with a premise that oddly borrows from a singing competition: NBC‘s The Voice. Like that hit, The Taste has four judges–Anthony Bourdain, Nigella Lawson, Ludovic Lefebvre and Brian Malarkey–who will mentor four teams, and a brazenly similar gimmick: the judges choose their teams “blind,” tasting dishes before they see or hear from the cook. On the face of it, this seems to try to fix a problem cooking competitions generally don’t have. The idea behind The Voice’s spinning chairs was to avoid choosing singers on the basis of their looks or other, supposedly less lofty and pure, considerations than The Voice. Shows like Top Chef have plenty of personality drama and backstabbing–just look at last week’s Restaurant Wars elimination–but you don’t generally hear judges saying, “Sure, he can cook, but does anyone want a $200 meal from somebody who looks like that?” In the intro, Bourdain tells us that the mentors won’t hear anyone’s backstory before judging because “We don’t give a damn.” Great! Neither do I! So why spend half the episode showing
Read full story at: Tuned In
Posted: January 23rd, 2013
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