An announcement came to me the other day. It began with this: "It's a culinary contest like no other!"
That's not true, for a start. The announcement pertained to CTV's The Marilyn Denis Show and MasterChef Canada combining to hold a cooking contest for kids. It's the second time this has been done. Fox's MasterChef has already done several seasons of MasterChef Junior. Like many announcements that come in the Canadian TV racket, it has some very dubious assertions.
The gist is that Canadian children between the ages of eight and 13 are invited to submit videos of themselves doing some whiz-bang cooking. A batch will be posted online and people vote. Two finalists will appear on the show and the winner will get a "culinary trip" to Rome. Each semi-finalist wins a culinary prize pack valued at $225, the announcement asserts. Two-hundred-and-twenty-five bucks, no less. Never accuse Canadian TV of blowin' high dough.
My point, which I'm sure you're hungry to ingest, is that mainstream television has come to treat food and cooking in a lamentably trivial manner. There's food porn, all manner of competitive-cooking contests and, obviously, the sheer cuteness of kids cooking meals while competing for a prize. And then there's one food program that transcends the entire diminished genre that is, handily, available on Netflix any old time.
MasterChef (Fox, CTV, 8 p.m.) reaches its two-hour finale for the current season tonight. The series straddles both the good and bad of food shows on TV. (I cannot stand MasterChef Canada, which is so wildly melodramatic and manipulative it is indigestible.) Gordon Ramsay knows he has a good thing going with the formulaic drama of the competing contestants and teams. But he occasionally reduces the theatrics and introduces the grave matter of food itself and how it is cooked.
Part of the allure of MasterChef is the many and varied ways in which the contestants, all home cooks, approach what they cook and eat. It's a matter of background and region. Your middle-class home cook from a big city will attempt to imitate European cuisine with flourishes and pretension. Those who are obviously less well-off have a more pragmatic approach to cooking and, essentially, aim to provide food for a family. There's a sociological study waiting to be done about what MasterChef reveals about the American culture.
And then, at times, Ramsay asks contestants to cook the most ordinary of dishes involving meat and eggs. These are often the most difficult tasks for people who fancy themselves as experts. And when Ramsay explains the most basic tenets of cooking very ordinary meals, these are often educational, cautionary tales.
Worst Cooks in America: Celebrity Edition (Food Network, 9 p.m.) returns tonight for another season. It is one of the worst food shows on TV, a vehicle for has-beens to get some attention. Anne Burrell and Rachael Ray each lead a team of "celebrity cooking disasters" through what is called "an intense culinary boot camp."
If you really want to see Mike Sorrentino, known as "The Situation" on Jersey Shore, while he screws up cooking a meal, then he's here, along with the guy who hosted the game show Wipeout for a while, a woman from one of the Real Housewives programs and others you've never really heard of.
The series is an example of food and cooking being truly trivialized in an egregious manner. It reeks of dumb.
Chef's Table (two seasons streaming on Netflix) reeks of smart. Each episode concentrates on an internationally renowned chef and, generally, on his or her restaurant. But that's the only format. The chef is treated as an artist and food is treated as the essence of life. An episode might be about a chef's personal history or it might be about sustainability. It could be about running a restaurant or it could be about foraging for local food.
The episodes are gorgeously made and tend to shy away from the food-porn staple of visually sumptuous treatment of raw food being turned into a meal. Each moves at a stately pace and, in each, you are left with something to think about. It's the absence of gimmickry that sets it apart. The majority of food shows these days are appallingly phony about something that is the most authentic thing of all.
Also airing Wednesday
Blindspot (NBC, CTV, 10 p.m.) is one of the early-returning network shows. This second season about the intricately tattooed lady known as Jane Doe, will, according to its, creator, be less complicated. Canadian Martin Gero said this recently: "You're going to learn Jane's real name in episode one of season two. You're going to find out a lot. A lot. And it will be real this time." Get that it will be "real."
American Horror Story (FX Canada, 10 p.m.) returns for season six tonight, and its content and themes are, literally, a mystery. While several trailers have been released, some are deliberately "misdirections," according to FX. The plan to make it all very vague and the setting a surprise is deliberate, apparently. Lady Gaga is back, though. That's certain. Given how the series has meandered and fallen flat in recent years, the mystery's answer, when revealed, might amount to more creepy nothing-nonsense.