Monday, October 20, 2008

Top Chef Season 5 Coming Up!

Woo-hoo! November 12 at 9pm CST and I cannot wait. Make sure to mark calendars. But I do have some concerns regarding this new season that heads to New York City.

1. There's a new judge. Ted Allen has apparently flown the coop. Tom and Padma are still around as is Gail (and, really, what would a TC be without Gail flirting shamelessly with one particular male chef through the whole season--see Sam from Season 3). They're good. They're okay. But, there's a new guy on the official roster. His name is Toby Young. He wrote some famous book about cooking. I just hope he's not a loser. I was secretly hoping they'd keep that 4th judge's chair open for some fantastic guest judges as they have in the past (Bourdain, Ruhlman, Ripert, even DiSpirito). I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

2. The Cheftestants look very accomplished...and severe. This always concerns me. For marketing purposes, the casting of these shows has gotten skewed by who's willing to be the most obnoxious thing on tv. I hope this is not the case. If we learned anything from last season can it be that Stephanie was the perfectly likeable "girl next door" who happens to wield her knife like a culinary sabre. I hope these people are interesting and talented and not just loud.

3. The challenges. As we've seen in other skill-based reality shows (Project Runway to name one), as the seasons progress the file-o-fax of challenges gets thinner and things can get very bizarre. Top Chef consistently surprises me with the fine balancing of creative challenges that are do-able and that showcase necessary foundational skills. I hope they keep it up. If "cooking with Pop Rocks" is a challenge, I'm going to be annoyed.

4. Keep the drama for your mama. One of the major annoyances I have with the continuation of these types of shows is that latter seasons often opt to focus on "character storylines" instead of the minute-to-minute developments. So, producers find the "interesting" people and interview only them or edit the show to focus on relationships that are taken out of the context of the competition. Top Chef has done a great job of not really doing that and I hope they stay true to form here. The season with Marcel was enough for anyone to handle and they seemed to correct for that last season. I hope they stay in that vein and don't head back to fabricated dramatics.

There it is. Those are my worries couched in between my utter and abject excitement of something great to watch on a weekly basis. I'm counting down the days. Seriously.

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