This one is a request from a long time ago. Wintercow20, a loyal MR reader, asked:
What do you think of Top Chef? I am an addict!
I am a fan of reality TV but mostly I have chosen blogging instead. I’ve seen about a dozen Top Chef episodes, mostly through the urging of darling Yana. Mark of excellence: the drama is so good that the commentary makes sense even though you can’t taste the food. It’s a show about learning, excellence, and motivation. The voice-over narratives are an object lesson in behavioral economics and self-deception.
Here is a wonderful post by Grant McCracken on reality TV; excerpt:
Reality programming is not just cheap TV, it is responsive TV. Surely,
one of the most sensible way for the programming executive to
get back in touch with contemporary culture is to turn the show offer
to untrained actors who have no choice but to live on screen, in the
process importing aspects of contemporary culture that would otherwise
have to be bagged and tagged and brought kicking and screaming into
the studio and prime time. Reality programming is contemporary culture
on tap. It is by no means a "raw feed." That is YouTube’s job. But
it is fresher than anything many executives could hope to manage by
their own efforts. In effect, reality programming is "stealing
signals" from an ambient culture, helping TV remain in orbit. (Mixed
metaphor alert. Darn it, too late.)
Grant adds: "Reality programming also serves as a way for a divergent culture to
stay in touch."
Addendum: I don’t see why she married Salman Rushdie; books are reproducible after all.
Second addendum: Here is Matt Yglesias, on the new form of reality TV…markets indeed in truly everything.
Well, she later filed for divorce, so perhaps she agrees.
Here is my question. (Perhaps you have addressed this before.) What do you think about the fact that you have achieved the kind of celebrity (minor or not) where people who don’t know you care what you think of their favorite television show? Do you know of anything interesting to read on the phenomenon of personal fandom?
I was a regular Top Chef watcher for the first couple of seasons but eventually gave up on it. Too much petty bickering and too many hissy fits. It’s almost as if personalities are more important than cooking skills.
Tapout, on the Versus network, is lesser-known but excellent reality show.
My wife and I also like to watch Top Chef, for many of the same reasons mentioned above: “the commentary makes sense even though you can’t taste the food. It’s a show about learning, excellence, and motivation.”
My main complaint is the lack of blind judging. This is especially problematic for the non-guest judges who can amass biases over the course of a season.
The dishes should be presented and tasted without connection to the competitor(s) who created them. I think the drama would be enhanced when we can the surprise on both the judges’ and competitors’ when the results are revealed each week. As a potential customer of these chefs, I would place a great deal more faith in the accuracy of the assessments if they were blind.
Alas, that would mean they couldn’t fix the results keep the high-drama chefs on the show until the very end…
Actually, I’ve another reality tv request, which pertains much more directly to economics: what do you think of Deadliest Catch? The entire show is basically a real-life experiment in economic behavior.
For example, season 1 was the last year that crab were fished under the ‘Derby’ rules (each boat fished as much as they could, until Fish & Game called an end to the season based on when they expected the quota would be met). Starting with season 2, they fell under the Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ), where each boat was assigned a different fishing quota based on their past hauls. The idea was to make it safer by giving boats more time to reach their individual quotas, thereby removing the incentive to work 30-hour shifts in terrible conditions.
Instead, what wound up happening was that the larger boats started leasing the quotas of the smaller boats, and continued to work 30-hour shifts in lousy weather to make huge sums of money. As risk declined, the crews increased their workload until the risk was exactly the same as before, with a proportionally larger reward (more money). So instead of 250 boats working under extremely hazardous conditions for 10 days, you get 80 boats working under extremely hazardous conditions for 60 days. The accident & fatality rate hasn’t changed, except you now have fewer people capturing most of the rewards under what is essentially a government-sponsored monopoly.
it is funny for the things, it is also magic
we can find this kind of news at any website
Comments on this entry are closed.