This is a series of rants about things I find interesting, challenging and perhaps downright idiotic on television.
My Kitchen Rules: also known as MKR.
Well what can I say? It is for me undoubtedly one of the most entertaining things on the box, and also one of the most frustrating to follow, and follow I must. I love food, I love seeing ordinary people (who I unashamedly relate to ) having a go at cooking amazing food; I love the drama that unfolds between the different people. I love Manu Feildel and Pete Evans, and think they make a wonderfully balanced pair of judges/hosts. I also love the guest judges at the Kitchen Headquarters cook-offs: Karen Martini, George Grossi, Liz Egan and Colin Fassnidge; they add a classiness, and an edge to the whole scene, validating the contestant's efforts, making appreciative noises and constructive criticisms in a very encouraging manner. I love the concept of the show: pitching home cooks in teams against each other, with all of them developing and becoming very competent potential chefs along the way. Great food and produce being showcased throughout the show is another great incentive to watch for me, because I am passionate about this as well, (as are many viewers I would imagine ). MKR is a package that is hard to resist, if you're a food lover like me. Or even just enjoy a bit of melodrama in a kitchen, like some. It is a Foody Soapy on wheels.
So what is there not to like about MKR?
Hmmm, let me count the ways.
My first complaint about the series is the way the mobile kitchen team episodes work. We get week after week of these challenges occurring in various iconic locations, which I think are supposed to make us feel 'included' and entertained by the scenarios. However, they become pedestrian, after the third or fourth episode of office workers/children/market goers being foisted upon with varied-in-quality experiments of semi-amateur feasts, for which they obviously, must pay. We've seen these very same challenges on Ten's Master Chef and we're surely getting tired of the format by now, aren't we? The food itself became very predictable in these challenges, because it was either jumped-up cafe food, or dumbed-down restaurant quality food, with the same old same old recipes and techniques being played out again and again. Maybe an over arching sense of the instructive aims and goals in cooking techniques might have been a nice foreground to this format of the competition?
I can only speak for myself when I talk about the ways in which the different contestants affected me, and how I saw their journeys throughout the series. Then again, the way this whole thing has been packaged has left me with no choice but to think and feel a certain, prescribed way. As it turns out, all we MKR fans in our living rooms are getting the exact same feelings and messages in this way. Just ask your mates: who actually fell in love with Chloe and Kelly's antics, or didn't have a warm spot in their hearts for Uel and Chanel? The way this show is polished up and presented to us gives us very little room for engaging with it in any other way than the show's designers intended for us to. Here is an SMH live blog as the grand final episode went to air where just some of the viewers comments are shown, giving us quite a clear indication how people responded to the show.You can see there are many questions being asked by the punters.
I am not cynical nor suspicious; I am certain this is how it has been edited, packaged and delivered. How do I know this? Am I some kind of telepathic, omniscient being who can see into television world? Do I know people in the business, who leak me information? Actually no. I am just a punter at home, who likes to know how things run. So I watch and read between the lines. I can't help it.
I really would love to know: are they real-life BFFs, or is it just for this potentially money winning opportunity? Is this their own kitchen and their own gear? Are this team evenly matched or is it just one ambitious cook with a roped-in side-kick along for the ride? Did they actually make this beforehand, or in-front of the cameras? Who chose the dishes, and how much help did they get in deciding what to cook? Were there budget constraints? (Actually I'm pretty sure there mustn't have been! ) And the post-challenge pieces to camera- how do they get the contestants to narrate events with such accuracy of recollection? Does this happen directly or long after the events?
These are the questions that run through my underutilised brain as I sit slack-jawed three evenings a week, while I miss cutting edge dramas on ABC and SBS, leaving me to watch later them on the iPad, hopefully when I can find the time. Yes I am enjoying the food, the results, the tensions, but I am also bored by the constant repetitions of script by the contestants, who very obviously would not naturally be yelling out to their partner
'Babe, I am just putting these gorgeous short ribs on to cook in their own juices for 3 hours so that they melt in the judge's mouths, and we get the highest score possible, they had better cook through properly!' two or three times, in various wordings, as they do the very same procedure, before and after the ad break. Artificial and tedious for the viewer, imagine how it was for the contestant,who must have had to replay and re-word their actions over and over?
Just while I'm on a compassionate stream of thought: those poor Tassie girls, Thalia and Bianca, who dropped their plates down the stairs also did a promo, saying "sign up for MKR- you will never regret it". How hard must that have been, seeing how they were actually robbed from certain success on the back of that disaster after weeks of hard, almost faultless effort?
Have my impertinent queries ruined the MKR magic for you? Or did it fail to weave a spell over you as well?
How did you feel about the authenticity of the timing, the judging, the results and the audience and contestant reactions in the Grand Final? I smelled a rat, then read later, that the episode, including the staged presentation of a winner, to both finalist teams were filmed over a year ago. The poor teams did not find out until the other night just who had won, and have lived with this unresolved tension for so long, without any kind of acknowledgement (that I am aware of ) for an amazing effort, which certainly outdid any of their previous ones. Well that explains the jerky editing, the very fake reaction of badly acted gracious defeat by Chloe and Kelly, and the hurried and muddled shmozzle that the last scenes were to watch. And maybe, explains the way in which all these so-called 'reality TV' finals are concluded: in a completely hermetically sealed envelope, without a real resolution, until the whole series, in all it's finely edited glory, can be packaged and presented, along with interruptions and a dragging out to the 11th hour, to a distant, ravenous and impersonal audience, who just want a polished product, and none of the 'actual' human factor.
Oh dear. Those poor poor women, those poor winners, and poor losers, all of them. Yep, reality TV is "something you will never regret" hey?
I think I have completed my dissection here. I am sure there will be many more successful reality TV series, which can lay claim to 'real life' scenarios, and real time events. The fact that the MKR product was so removed from the real time of the actual event makes me look at it quite differently than I might have done. For me it's like the difference between factory made, sliced, packaged bread, and a homemade, crusty, imperfect one, that ends up delighting all the same. It smells real, for starters. I do get that the individual challenges themselves were conducted in real time, but really on what actual time-scale did the whole competition take place- weeks? months? Why is this not made known to us? How do those people cope without their families, and why does this not become more of a narrative in the series, as it does, obviously, in the Big Brother House or Top Model?
I would like to see a more rounded, authentic reality TV series about food and cooking, as messy as it might be to produce!
Here is a link to the official Channel Seven MKR Webpage
I'd be interested in comments and discussion about Reality TV in general. What are you likes/dislikes/thoughts?
