An uneasy, familiar feeling came over me when I watched last week’s premiere of Top Chef Masters. Afterward, I had it out in a snarky IM exchange with CNN’s Kat Kinsman, but my heart wasn’t really in it. There was something melancholy for me about seeing the Top Chef franchise at its lowest ebb, its already ludicrous premise stretched beyond the breaking point. It made me realize how much Top Chef inexplicably matters to me. And it made me wonder why.
Spin-offs are generally weak, pallid things, which rarely live for more than a few months in the network postnatal unit. As spin-offs go, Top Chef Masters, now in its third season, is long-lived — closer to Archie Bunker’s Place than The Ropers, say. It will probably limp along for another season or two, a reality-show revenant, before giving up the ghost.
Top Chef itself, of course, has been on the air for a decade now, with no signs of stopping. The basic premise of the show: obscure young cooks striving for fame and recognition compete in a series of random challenges and bicker bitterly along the way. The contest is given legitimacy by the judges, especially Tom Colicchio, whose natural authority and willingness to engage and take the show seriously makes the whole thing work. Top Chef Masters dispenses with both of these advantages. The contestants are already established chefs playing for charity money, so there are no stakes for anyone, and little in the way of backbiting: essentially, it’s what you might see at a high-end charity auction. And about as entertaining as a bottle of Nembutal.
But the chefs aren’t even the worst thing about Top Chef Masters. The worst part is the judges. Presumably to avoid any professional ill will, the show’s producers dispensed with the idea of having an actual chef as a judge, bringing in food writers to arbitrate the victory, and a truly stellar piece of eye candy in hostess Kelly Choi. Choi has since been replaced by the equally telegenic Curtis Stone, a man who seems to have somehow made an entire career of doing nothing but TV reality cooking shows. But unlike Choi, who was wisely kept far from the judging table, Stone is a judge as well as a host, and this, too, robs Top Chef Masters of any hope of drama, or credibility. A French titan like Jol Robuchon or Guy Savoy would have had the chefs, who are all American, quaking in fear; the flab and frivolity would fly away in a moment. The other judges, former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl and Saveur’s James Oseland, are universally respected in the food world, but they have to work with these guys and so are professionally inhibited from being too mean to them.
