Season 11 critical for "Top Chef"

Cooking shows used to be found pretty much exclusively on PBS back in the day.  Julia Child, The Galloping Gourmet, Martin Yan ("...Can Cook!") and others were chefs with shows that I stumbled onto and discovered an early love of food and wanting to cook it.  With the advent of cable in the 1980's and 1990's, these cooking shows found larger audiences on many other channels.  Then with the subsequent advent of reality television, cooking competition shows started up too.  One of the first was "Ready, Set, Cook!" and it ran for years.  Nowadays that show seems primitive compared to what's out there, but frankly, most of what's out there now just isn't too exciting.  "Chopped" is OK.  "Iron Chef America" too (although a pale comparison to the original Japanese series that really was the single show that put Food Network on the map).  One show stood out.  Debuting in 2006 on the Bravo network, "Top Chef" was the first cooking competition to be of marathon proportions, and ultimately the food is what mattered.  It was an instant smash, and many of the winners (plus a few non-winners) have found their careers to flourish after competing on the show.  By the time Seasons 6-8 rolled around, this was legitimately one of the best, if not THE best, competition shows on TV, period.  As always seems to be the case though, producers always want to tinker.  And tinker.  And tinker.  And the result usually ends up a stinker.  And stinker.  And stinker.  In just over one year's time, "Top Chef" went from the heights of awesomeness to audience revolt.  And the worst of it is, Season 10 almost got it right and washed out the nasty taste of Season 9 from everyone's mouths.  But then that finale...ohhhhhh, that finale...

What caused this train to derail?  From being the first reality competition program to unseat "The Amazing Race" for the Emmy to turning out what was considered easily the worst season in the show's history in a year's time?  Was Season 9 truly THAT bad?  Well, simply put...yes.  There were signs right off the bat that Season 9 was going to be bad news.  Seasons would generally have x-teen number of competitors, but since Season 9 was in Texas, and "everything's bigger in Texas", the hype was that a whopping twenty-nine chefs would be competing.  Fans wondered how this was going to play out, and it didn't take long to find out.  Taking a page from the likes of FOX's "MasterChef", those twenty-nine chefs were not automatically going to "compete".  First they had to cook a dish for the judges and impress them.  If the dish was successful, they would get a chef's coat and "officially" be on the show.  This made no sense, because if the chefs were being filmed (which they were) and if the episode was airing on Bravo (which it was), the chefs were ALREADY on the show.  This preliminary round was a complete waste of time, made worse by the fact that it stretched across the first two episodes of the season.  Fans were unable to learn anything about the chefs, and consequently, make any connection.  However, if after all this silliness we'd be down to about sixteen chefs and then the show would return to normal, I'm sure this preliminary stuff could have been forgiven.

Unfortunately, it only got worse.  The results of the MasterTopChef preliminaries gave us folks like those above.  Four of them were completely forgettable, and even worse, two of them were amongst the Final Four.  There was a lot of mediocrity going on here week after week, exacerbated by most of the challenges being BBQ and/or meat-related (Texas, after all), and/or team challenges.  Oh, plus every few weeks the chefs were driving to new cities to compete for several episodes.  So what this season had an overabundance of so far was mediocrity, driving, teaming up and meat.

Within all of this mediocrity, we got several people that were just plain unlikable.  Reality show "villains" are nothing new, but rarely do we get people that are just so goddam horrible like we did with Heather Terhune and Sarah Grueneberg.  One chef, Beverly, was pretty socially inept, but a decent chef.  Unfortunately, Heather just found every opportunity to put Bev down.  Still, she was nothing compared to Sarah (she's at the far left of the above picture), who was a nasty person from Week One right up to the finale and beyond.  During the reunion episode, she was called out for allegedly cursing out one of the judges.  She denied it, but did so by revealing what exactly happened and to whom (she told Emeril to fuck off), so that outed her.  This girl was the runner-up?

Now, it should be noted there were some memorable faces competing here.  Edward Lee was impressive, cool and obviously knew his stuff.  In fact, my wife and I just purchased his cookbook days ago.  Grayson Schmitz was funny, sexy and a little less "Top Chef" level, but still solid.  Her bullfrog song and a comment about food tasting so good it would be like "sex in the mouth" are now legendary amongst fans.  She would have won the Fan Favorite voting, but that was completely hijacked by the mediocre Chris Crary, who looked and cooked nowhere near as good as he thought.  However, he ran an internet campaign that had so much recruitment and wrangling that he completely ran away with the vote, much to the chagrin of Bravo host Andy Cohen, who when announcing Chris as the winner did little to hide his disdain.  (The Fan Favorite vote was subsequently changed beginning in Season 10 because of this.)

Oh, and I almost forgot Last Chance Kitchen!  This was a web series that would be available to view each week after the show ended on Bravo.  In LCK, losing chefs had a chance to win their way back in.  Whoever was the LCK champion would face off against the latest to be sent home in a one-on-one challenge.  At a certain point, whoever was the champion there was re-entered into the fold.  I hated this idea from the start.  I still do.  It wound up really seeming like a waste of time in the end because the chef who won her way back into the main competition (Beverly) wound up getting the boot in her first episode back anyway.

So who won?  Paul Qui (above), and it was never in doubt.  From almost the start of this entire season, he was the only chef consistent and talented enough.  This competition could have been called after the first month, because there was little doubt either Paul or Edward would win, and once Edward got the boot, that was all she wrote.  But by this point, fans were both reeling and seething from what was a major letdown from prior seasons.  Season 9 could have been considered an anomaly, but hopefully Season 10 would see improvement.  If anything, hopefully at least we'd never see something like the below dish...

...be called a winning dish.  And yes, that glopga up there WAS a dish that won a Quickfire Challenge, where the chefs could only use canned and packaged goods from a roadside convenience store.  I wouldn't eat that if you put a gun to my nuts.  I've vomited more appealing sights than that.

So alright...Season 10 was a lot better.  No more preliminary crap.  Chefs with talent.  A few chefs from previous seasons returned for a second go-round, which I didn't mind so much since they were pretty good.  Actually, two of them were good, and the third one was Josie.  All in all, the season was a lot of fun and fans were happy.  But then things went awry, step by step.  Step One was the aforementioned Josie, who should have been eliminated after a team challenge loss because she was an inept jackalope, but instead she rattled off excuse after excuse and backhandedly blamed the team leader, Kristin Kish.  Kristin chose not to defend herself, and that combined with the mistakes she made caused her to be eliminated.

But fear not!  Last Chance Kitchen was back again.  Step Two.  Kristin made it there and won every round of it, so she found her way back in for Step Three.  Still, she missed a good five episodes of the actual competition.  Ultimately, the Final Four were Josh, Brooke and Sheldon.  Wait, that's only three, right?  Yes, you're right.  We had a final three, then Josh was eliminated.  And THEN, Kristin returned.  So the final three happened twice with different parties.  And then Sheldon was next out, so we had the two ladies left.  Kristin, who was very good but missed 5-6 shows battling it out in LCK challenges that were a lot less stressful.  And Brooke, who was EXCELLENT, won a lot of challenges and deserved her place at the top.

Fans eagerly awaited the finale, where the duo would cook a multi-course meal for the judges and show them the best they could muster.  It sort of happened that way.  Just not how it should have.  Instead, we got Step Four...

IRON TOP CHEF!

What in the fucking fuck was this?!

The finale opened with Padma in front of a whooping and cheering live audience, and the chefs were already COOKING!  And they were doing so with three sous chefs (already-eliminated contestants) that we had NO IDEA how they wound up chosen to be with Kristin or Brooke.  Eventually through all the confusion and some flashbacks to help explain what in the holy hell was going on here, we learned this was a Best-of-Five finale.  After each round, the chefs would be judged, and the judges would vote for who won the round.

Yeah...this wasn't good.

Fans almost immediately went apeshit on social media about this finale, and the first commercial hadn't even aired yet.  But it is what it is, right?  So we watched.  Round One went to Kristin.  OK.  Round Two went to Brooke.  OK.  Round Three went to Kristin.  So now Brooke had to win Round Four or it was over!  The judges have tasted the fourth dish...how will they vote?  We'll find out after this commercial!

The commercials started, and all of us watching noticed the clock said 10:54PM.  So unless a whole hell of a lot was going to happen in six minutes, we already knew the result.  The show returned from commercial and in accordance with the laws of time, physics and advertising, Kristin was the winner.

So Kristin won the season in which she had been eliminated, missed five weeks of the show, returned in the second-to-last episode, and won a finale that had NOTHING to do with how "Top Chef" is supposed to operate.

If I were Brooke, I'd have told more than Emeril to fuck off.

So that ended Season 10, and probably because even Bravo and Andy Cohen knew this show was getting skewered right now by the now-dwindling-and-complaining-in-droves audience, they didn't even bother taping or airing a reunion episode.  The only post-Season item of note was this tweet from Tom Colicchio, which he stated just hours after that finale aired:

Yeah...good call there.

Now, here we are at Season 11; it begins tonight.  Frankly, I think it's going to make or break the future of this show and this franchise.  What needs to happen this season?  It's quite simple, really.  Stop with the tinkering.  Stop with the dramatic gimmicks.  Stop trying to be bigger.  Stop with Last Chance Kitchen (this probably will be back, unfortunately).  And hey, here's an idea...have a finale that actually involves real cooking instead of Beat The Clock.

Go back to what brought you to the dance.  Otherwise, it could be lights out.