To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction: My girlfriend's a Gordon Ramsay fan, so that pretty much makes me a Gordon Ramsay fan.
Well, maybe it doesn't work quite that way, but it's safe to say that without her, I'd have never watched Hell's Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares or his BBC show The F Word. And despite my general hostility to non-scripted TV shows, I've enjoyed them all, more or less.
I like The F Word because it's more about food than the other two shows. On HK and KN, the focus is on personality conflicts: chef vs. chefs, or Ramsay vs. owners, owners vs. staff, etc. Here, he actually spends a lot of time explaining his recipes, as well as teaching other people basic cooking skills.
I like Hell's Kitchen because it takes all the things I find the most distasteful about this kind of competition -- the backstabbing, the alliances, the endless declarations that "I didn't come here to make friends, I came here to win!" -- and turns them on their head. Ramsay will arbitrarily kick people out of the kitchen -- or off the show -- or simply change the rules of the game, rendering all that cutthroat nonsense moot.
And then there's Kitchen Nightmares, the biggest gamble of the three, and certainly the most contrived. It's not that I don't buy that these restaurants are struggling, or that their kitchens are full of month-old chicken and rancid vegetables. (Actually, the filthy kitchens and Ramsay's resulting revulsion are usually my favorite parts of the show.) It's that I question some of the conflicts the show sets up, either between Ramsay and the owner or among members of the staff. They often seem overblown, and manage to resolve themselves way too easily.
Still, it's a bit of...pardon the expression...TV comfort food. It's interesting how the solutions are almost always the same: smaller menu, fresh food. In many cases, he -- or rather FOX -- will spring for a giant renovation for the restaurant. (On the BBC version of the show, the budget just isn't there, so the most UK restauranteurs can hope for is a new coat of paint.) And it's not always a happy ending; some of these places are in too much debt to be saved.
Lately, however, we've been forgoing Gordon for another food-related show that airs at the same time: Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.
The show follows Oliver -- another British celebrity chef, and one that Ramsay* apparently dislikes -- as he tries to convince the residents of a West Virginia college town to eat better. Huntingdon, WV, Oliver reminds us each week, was determined by the CDC to be the least healthy city in America.
*It's interesting: neither chef would do well in the others job. Ramsay can be affable enough when he wants to, but there's no way he'd put up with some of the people who put up "That's Not How We Do Things Here" roadblocks for Oliver. And I couldn't see Oliver badgering people into changing the way Ramsay does.
So the stakes are somewhat higher than a failing restaurant. In the first episode, Oliver meets a 12-year-old boy who's just learned he's at risk for diabetes. In the third episode, there's a girl whose weight is destroying her liver, meaning she might not make it out of her twenties. Last week, he visited a funeral home that has had to start marketing Toyota-sized coffins.
It's easy to root for Oliver, an energetic, super-polite outsider up against heavy odds. Unlike Gordon Ramsay, no one's really invited him to help. The head lunch lady at the school where he's trying to introduce a healthy menu seems to hate him, and the local radio DJ -- whom Oliver really wanted on his side -- spent the first two thirds of the series claiming he'd fail.
I imagine he'll achieve some sort of ultimate victory; if his revolution had been a total failure, ABC wouldn't have broadcast it. And so far, he's gotten a few wins, like teaching 1,000 people to cook. But two thirds of the way through -- the show has aired four of six episodes -- his battle seems like it's just begun.
The only other non-scripted show on my radar these days is A&E's Billy the Exterminator. There's not much to it; an exterminator in Louisiana responds to rats, bees, roaches, etc. What I enjoy most about the show is how Billy's zeal for his job usually leads him to present everything in worst-case-scenario terms. The raccoon in your attic isn't just a nuisance; it'll blind your baby!
Also, for an exterminator, he really seems to love animals, so a lot of the show is about him trying to capture and then relocate the various critters on people's properties.
Not rats and insects though. They're pretty much screwed.
Tom Coombe
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