When I was younger, my family would all gather around the television to watch “Murder, She Wrote”. It was one of our traditions. And even as a youth, certain facts became very clear very quickly, such as:
1. Never visit Cabot Cove, Maine – a LOT of people get murdered there.
2. Are we sure it wasn’t Jessica Fletcher the whole time? A lot of people get murdered in her vicinity.
3. The real murderer is never the person they think it is/arrest at the end of act two, because at that point we’re only halfway through the episode and we have thirty more minutes to go.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was learning all about television and programming structure, and how it can hinder, or, at a minimum, formalize narrative construction. This is nothing new – we know that television is a type of narrative that lives within certain rules (most shows have commercial breaks and thus are built to generate excitement to hold you through said breaks, or how when Ted McGinley or Paula Marshall show up your show is probably not long for this world). But clever shows manage to turn things on their head, and subvert our expectations within the structure, rather than giving in to the inevitable and allowing the audience to be ahead of the program.
This brings me to last night’s season finale of “Top Chef”, which I was excited to see. Previews had promised an exciting, Iron Chef-style competition, which seemed like a bit of a gimmick, but at least it would provide us with something new in the finale, rather than the tried and true (but still generally entertaining) “cook whatever you want and win us over” – which, realistically, should ALWAYS be the final – no gimmicks. No secret ingredients. Just let them cook and let the best one win.
Then they announced the rules and everything went to shit.
The fundamental problem with the format last night was the fact that the chefs would be judged DISH BY DISH – which, in theory, means that we’ve got an exciting tally to keep track of. It’s like a sporting event. It will add to the excitement and the hype and the pressure. In theory. Five dishes. First to three wins. Exciting, right?
Except that meant that by the time we got to the fourth dish, and there was clearly only time for one more act, everyone watching the show knew that Kristen had just won the competition. The pressure, the buildup, and the release, which the competitors all got to experience (and which, in the best cases, is the same emotional tension that is transferred to the viewer) landed flat with everyone watching at home, because we knew there were only five minutes left and there was no way they were going to have time to give Brooke the win and get to the fifth dish.
(There is another problem with the format that we were spared this season, in that any close competition will come down to dessert, and as any fan of “Top Chef” knows, dessert can be a bit of a debacle on the show because these are professional chefs, and many of them don’t have the experience to create a top-flight dessert. It’s a very different skillset.)
Because the viewers at home can’t actually experience the most important part of “Top Chef” (tasting the food), a preservation of suspense is the most crucial element to actually enjoying the show. The finale last night, while an interesting change, was doomed to fail at that the moment they decided to announce who won on a dish-by-dish rate rather than judging them on the entire meal at the end.
That being said, I doubt it’s a mistake they’ll make again. If nothing else, “Top Chef” has proven to be fairly resilient and creative in tweaking the formula, as well as swinging back toward the middle when they’ve veered too far off course (looking at you, Season 9, and your stupid “shoot a gun at the ingredient you want” challenge in THE FINAL FOUR). And at least we had a final with two cheftestants who deserved to be there (*cough* Hosea in season 5 *cough*), and were assured that one of the good guys (or girls, in this case) would win.
UPDATE: I didn’t see this when I first published the post, but apparently head judge Tom Colicchio also didn’t like the format and tweeted as much, saying that he doubts they’ll do it again. One can only hope.