The two-hour Finale of Fox’s MasterChef aired last night — it was a busy night for Word-then-”Chef” shows — and because I had nothing to do from 8 to 10, I decided to watch it for the first time and catalog my thoughts on Top Chef’s latest network competitor.
Overall, the MasterChef Finale wasn’t bad, but the 2-hour “summer show filler” running time was a little painful, in addition to the show’s trademark characteristic of being incredibly overdramatized to an almost insulting degree, as though we couldn’t possibly sustain interest in a show that doesn’t punctuate every action that occurs with a THUD and the Crimson Tide soundtrack.
That said, in the spirit of democracy, here are my specific observations about how the show differed from Top Chef, in both good and bad ways (moooostly the latter). But first, the funniest shot from last night’s Finale:
After the winner (Whitney Miller) was announced, a bunch of confetti came pouring down from the the ceiling, along with some awkwardly-quiet stock “triumph” music. The runner up, David Miller — a somewhat arrogant dude with concrete-gelled hair — then gave his entire post-show interview with a big piece of confetti stuck to his gelled-ass hair, and the director clearly intentionally didn’t tell him about it:
Hard to see there. But it happened. And I LOLed. Maybe not MasterLOLed, but it was still better than no LOL.
Moving on, here are my observations about MasterChef vs. Top Chef, based entirely on the two hours of the series I just watched:
- MasterChef is full of narration from an unseen female voice, as opposed to Top Chef, which moves along organically and incorporates any exposition into the contestants’ testimonials, albeit sometimes awkwardly (“We hopped into this sick Toyota Avalon and went to Whole Foods, which was also sick. No I was not told to say that sentence, why?”) The voice does work to move things along, but it’s a little crutch-y, like the narration in Vicky Cristina Barcelona vs. the non-narration in Match Point, or the narration in this past week’s episode of Mad Men vs. the non-narration in every other episode of Mad Men ever.
- MC has a cliffhanger before every single commercial break. This obviously requires the show to manufacture cliffhangers by teasing clips that appear to show something super-major happening or about to happen, and after the commercial, 4 out of 5 times that thing wasn’t actually a big deal. It’s like the reality show version of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or the reality show version of most reality shows. (If they ever do a reality show based on Next Generation, it is gonna have some serious cliffhangers. Way more than the movie Cliffhanger, which actually did not have many.)
For example, during the tasting portion of the final showdown, Gordon and Joe Bastianich each took a bite of David’s appetizer course and Joe started coughing — almost gagging — followed by a shot of David’s face panicking, followed by an abrupt cut to commercial. You ask yourself, “Did David just kill Joe and instantly lose the competition and now he’s being sued?” Then the show comes back from commercial and it turns out David’s appetizer was spicier than Joe had anticipated, but Joe loves it. Whew! Turns out the only Cliff there was the dude from Cheers. He is not life-threatening.
- Gordon kept saying the phrase “This looks good…but is it MasterChef material?” Um, we don’t know. We haven’t defined what MasterChef material is, because this is the first season. Unless we were supposed to have torrent-ed the British version and studied that. Or maybe he was actually asking everyone if things were MasterChef material to get a better idea of what that means, to then use that definition in subsequent seasons? Probably that.
- Gordon also called the Finale “The most important cooking competition going on, in America, tonight.” Wow, THE most important cooking competition going on in that country on that evening? That’s impressive. Like being the highest-grossing fantasy film of the February 5th box office weekend. And guess what? Because Top Chef aired last night, it wasn’t even true!
- In the Finale, the chefs each cooked only one plate of each dish, and the judges would all sample from the same plate, with Gordon tasting it first, then Graham, then Joe. The show would always be edited, though, so the next judge just had the food in front of them and was about to put a bite into their mouth, as though we wouldn’t notice it was all from the same plate. Personally, in a two-hour Finale, I would’ve wanted to see the awkward exchange where Gordon passes the plate to his subordinates and they have to cut around the part Gordon ate to find their own bites, not unlike some Viking king being full of a giant mutton leg and chucking it to his sex-guards.
- And last but not least, “Master Chef” really looks like “Master Chief,” the main character from the Halo games. If anyone wants to Photoshop something with that, I’ll link it, but I am currently spent.
Anyone watch MasterChef? Anyone going to continue watching / stop watching MasterChef? Anything about the series that I missed by only watching part of the Finale then writing this blog post (highly unlikely)? Leave any MasterChef reactions /general information in the comments.
