Another Guilty Pleasure

I'm not a fan of reality TV shows. I have watched enough of the biggies -- Survivor, American Idol, Dancing With Whomever -- to know I don't want to go there. Ten minutes is more than enough. There's no "reality" in them. After five minutes of listening to whining on the island, I was rooting for a volcano to erupt and bury them all in lava twelve feet deep. That anybody would submit themselves to Simon's snarkiness for any amount of fame and money amazes me. That football players can dance? That is not so amazing.

That said, I got hooked into one on the Food Network.

The Next Food Star is, of course, as silly as any of the other reality shows. The premise is simple: A bunch of young folks who want to have their own show on the cooking channel, are put into a communal house, and must face a series of cooking challenges given by well-known chefs. Each week, one of them is kicked off, until ...

In the end there can be only one ...

The contestants in this year's version range from a nineteen-year-old kid who blushes a lot, to a Dallas woman who looks like a Cosmo model with a private entrance at Neiman Marcus. Still left on is a shave-headed black guy who cooks in a hospital, a perky little thing who used to have her own cable access cooking show in college, and somebody's mama who cries at the drop of a hat. Plus a wanna-be stand-up comic whose main goal seems to be able to manage to cook something -- anything -- that isn't raw ...

Nipa the midwestern Indian girl got cut last night, and good riddance.

It is, by design, the bridge of the starship Enterprise. A Rainbow Coalition crew.

They get thrown into the pressure cooker: You have to prepare a meal for thirty Coast Guard guys, on the cutter, using their galley, you have one hour, and you have to use white chocolate or Fruit Loops or grape jelly in your main dish ...

Typically, one, maybe two dishes are edible enough to impress the three-judge panel, the rest stink on ice. On an earlier show, guest judge Iron Chef Morimoto allowed out loud that one pork dish was unfit for human consumption. Last night, one of the chefs said, I took one bite of that crepe and spit it out. Yet these cooks are still on the show ...

It's brutal. Well, faux-brutal. And the funny thing about it is, they must have had thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of applications to be on the show, and these were the best they could do? People who can't cook an egg? Who cringe at touching a fish?

It's Moe, Curly, and Larry meet Joan Rivers in the kitchen. Woo-woo-woo-woo!

They can't possibly be picked for their culinary skills, but for how much people are going to be rooting for or against them. The producers shoot a lot of footage, and then show you what they want you to feel good or bad about. It's a Punch and Judy puppet play, more manipulative than a stadium full of chiropractors ...

The highlight of the season so far is when Lisa from Dallas, who wears three-hundred-dollar blouses, pearls, and hooker heels to cook, slipped and fell on her butt and spilled half a quart of sauce all over herself -- her presentation immediately after that was, hands-down terrific. She needs to slip and fall and coat herself in barbecue soak every episode ...

Ah, what can I say? It's a guilty pleasure.