The Food Network (FN) is a strange animal. I liken it to my cat. My cat does what she wants. She’s sweet one moment, a disaster the next. She shows surprising brilliance usually as well as amazing acrobatic skills. At other times she takes her favorite little ball and purposely sticks it under the sofa and pushes it so far in so she can no longer get to it any more, to her own detriment. She’ll also make a jump from the floor up to the window, a move she’s done thousands of times, and every once in a while inexplicably misshoot it and fall to the ground dazed. Silly cat!

She’s often entertaining, my cat, and overall I do adore her. But quite often she gets in wild and weird moods, running around the house super fast and going no where, scratching things she shouldn’t. and behaving in ways just plain annoying and which make me wonder just what is going through that furry little mind of hers.

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Time to go around the “dial” — remember when televisions had dials? or am I dating myself again” — and look at what’s happening and what’s worth watching in television food land.

The Next Iron Chef Finale

First to mention, as it’s a limited series and about to end tomorrow in fact is The Next Iron Chef. In two previous articles I’ve mentioned some of the “bad” or annoying that’s happened on the show. The behind the scenes and little known blunders created by the production team that put the competing chefs through hell as well as how later the judges seemed to think they were on another show where the idea was to change the essence of who each chef is. And while those were indeed valid revelations and criticisms, I probably wouldn’t have written about them unless on some level I cared. And indeed I do.

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Now that we’re at the half way point of the mini — repeat, very mini — series known as the six episodes of The Next Iron Chef (NIC) … cheers and jeers. As you can expect, the cheers go to the chefs, the jeers to the judges.

First my picks. It’s so much my own fault I didn’t say this prior to episode one when their were eight contenders, or even last week; saying it now, big deal, two out of four you’ll say. Anyhow, I do say now (and this hasn’t changed since the start, really) I think it’s going to be Besh or Symon. Again, thought so before it started, but only I know I’m telling you the truth here.

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… or “The Continued Unreality of Reality Television”

Reality television and behind the scenes manipulation by a program’s production staff has become a more common thing as time goes on. British television audiences in particular have been hit hard by this, in degrees from simple “staging” such as Nigella Lawson’s kitchen not being in her own house, all the way up to the “Blue Peter” double-whammy scandals.

Here in the US, the worse that we know of in recent times would be the “Man vs Wild” major fakes from adding smoke machines to a not-so-active volcano summit to the host actually sleeping in motels overnight — instead of in the wild. And that brings us to the latest manipulation. Although not a fake and not a fix in any sense — and therefore seeming at first glance to be a “lesser sin” — these particular production manipulations instead actually influenced and most likely altered the results of an on-air competition, as well as discredited a highly-held institution, and worse of all sent one contestant to the hospital.

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