BBC's MasterChef provides a refreshing (sad?) reminder that, once upon a time, "reality" TV shows really had something to do with reality

MasterChef Goes Large judges (top) John Torode and Gregg Wallace and finalists (bottom) Thomasina, Mark and Caroline

"You tell me how we turn around right now and say, 'One of these three people is winner of MasterChef.'"
--judge John Torode (at left in the photo), as he and fellow judge Gregg Wallace (right) settled down to the difficult task of choosing a winner from among the three impressive MasterChef Goes Large finalists

"You know, I would like to have won. Everyone likes to win. No one likes to come in a competition and get silver and bronze or whatever. But I'm so pleased for her. I couldn't have lost out to a more deserving person."
--finalist Mark, an advertising executive who had been cooking for only two years, and had no personal experience of what we might call the world of "fine dining," but obviously has immense natural talent (he produced excellent results a number of time with dishes and foods--duck, for example--he had never cooked before) and seems to suck up every bit of food knowledge that comes his way

"I think at the end of the day I'm a better cook than I thought I was. [Long pause.] And that's quite nice."
--finalist Caroline, a stockbroker who repeatedly demonstrated remarkable attention to detail and usually produced obsessively near-perfect results

"I tell you what. I should have done well at school, I should have done well at university, and I didn't. And I've always felt I had a lot to prove. But this has really made me feel that maybe I finally can set some ghosts to rest, and just get on with my life, and do brilliant things."
--MasterChef winner Thomasina, another brilliant natural cook, a relentless and resourceful experimenter and improviser, who as judge Gregg Wallace pointed out a number of times "cooks from the heart"

Ah, I got to watch all the remaining episodes of MasterChef Goes Large. And they were the best of all.

I've been thinking for a long time that we need to talk about the rise of the abomination known--ironically, I assume--as "reality TV." This isn't that talk yet. Probably the reason I haven't given it a higher priority is that, while I do think the form provides evidence of a culture as near death as I can imagine, I think it's a symptom rather than a cause of our national brain rot.

It wasn't always this way. An American Family, which was filmed in 1971 and shown on public television in 12 episodes in 1973, really tried to give us a glimpse of the real life of a real family. Obviously, as soon as the cameras are in place, the reality is transformed, but if all the participants--on both sides of the camera, and in the editing room afterward--try hard enough, we may get occasional flashes of real life that transcend the invented reality of even the best scripted dramas.

I imagine this was in the minds of the creators of MTV's The Real World when they set up shop in New York in 1991, and the show's early seasons were often fascinating. Of course, they often had to shape or even invent "story lines," since real life for the most part doesn't have any, and viewers damn well aren't going to tune in to life that real. As so often happens, though, the show seems to have been a victim of its own success, and began focusing on--and eventually almost imitating--its "hottest" and also least valuable elements. In the case of The Real Worldyou could watch the emphasis shift, season by season, to ever-prettier people, and the subject matter switch to only two subjects, drinking and sex. (The tipping point for me was the Hawaii season.)

I suppose many of us think that the one or two "reality" shows we happen to watch are the exception to the rule that reality TV is the celebration and commercial exploitation of brain rot. (Or else it's their "guilty pleasure.") We really need to talk about this, I think, but for now we're just going to sneak around the back way. Some of these shows, at least, really do involve skills, and give us insight into how those skills are developed and practiced.

In my mind, the normal "reality" show attracts viewers by announcing, if not screaming:

We're all totally useless, parasitic wretches of human beings--in other words, just a shade better than you the viewer. So watch us every week as we exhibit the full glory of our worthlessness, our vapidity, our putridness. And then yammer moronically about us with all your equally empty-lived friends until the next show.

It does, or at least it can, make a difference where the subject matter of the show constitutes a real, demonstrable skill. I confess that this year I looked for the first time at Project Runway. Even though I have no interest whatever in fashion or the fashion world, I could respond to people who have actual competences of various sorts.

Most recently, I got truly got hooked on the BBC's MasterChef Goes Large, which aired in the U.K. in 2005 but only just reached us, courtesy of BBC America. From a quick glance at the BBC website, I gather that there was some consternation in the U.K. about this third series of MasterChef, over a change in format which turned it into a reality show. And the early weeks of the show, the preliminary round in which four contestants at a time competed for one spot in the quarter-finals, were a shade hectic.

But still, the contestants were showing us in some fashion what they could do under controlled and reasonable conditions, and we developed a relationship with the two judges, John Torode and Gregg Wallace. I see on the BBC website that it is common to express shock at the supposed harshness of their judgments. And I find this utterly astonishing. Here are two food professionals being asked to judge the skills of these contestants. Are they truly supposed to say nothing except, "Ooh, it's just super-yummy"? We learn a lot in the course of these shows about the food profile of the judges--about Gregg's sweet tooth, for example. We know that if you serve him a good dessert, he will melt. But that won't change his opinion of your oddly conceived starter or badly executed main course.

At the start of each episode--and there were a lot of them in MasterChef Goes Large, with some 100 contestants to be winnowed down to the quarter-finals, and then a week's worth of quarter-finals, followed by a week each of semi-finals and finals--we got what a somewhat differently expressed statement by John, a well-known London restaurateur, of what MasterChef was looking for. This is the one used for the final episode:

"We're looking for passion. We're looking for somebody who's a team leader, but also a team player. We're looking for somebody who has dedication. And of course as a pro chef you've got to have stamina, you've got have drive."

When the quarter-finals started, if you'd seen all the earlier shows, you were seeing all the contestants for the second time, though you may not have remembered them terribly well. The four contestants who made it to the semi-finals were not only twice-familiar from their previous competitions but were now seen in five consecutive shows. And then, rather peculiarly, I have to say, only one contestant was eliminated! The three finalists then appeared in five more shows. Both judges and viewers became increasingly familiar with how finalists Thomasina, Mark and Caroline--with their wildly divergent backgrounds and personalities--approach food.

We've had some cooking "reality" shows in this country. I've learned a lot about how TV Food Network shows are produced from the two seasons of its search for The Next Food Network Star, but the food was almost incidental, and the whole notion that people can learn, that talented people can be trained to develop their talents and to plug the gaps in their experience (TV skills, for example) mostly went out the window. And Bravo is now showing the second season of its Top Chef, which so far looks somewhat better than the first (pictured here), which was almost compelling in its utter weirdness, weirdness that began with the astonishingly poor quality of the contestants. Were these really the best top-chef candidates the producers could find? Or were those people chosen for their colorful personalities and the resulting possibility of camera-happy conflict?

When we get around to talking about the problem(s) with the "reality" shows, one of the principal things we'll have to talk about is the dehumanized and dehumanizing quality of the much-loved principle of eliminating one contestant each week--as emblemized by that pestilential pile of puke Donald Trump delivering his celebrated "You're fired" (what on earth has this world come when people voluntarily spend even a second in the televisual company of The Donald, let alone watch the slimehead week after week?)--until you're left with a "winner."

In real life, that is--mercifully--hardly ever how we measure the value of contributions made by members of society. On the simplest level, when you separate "winners" and "losers" that way, there's no guarantee, in fact no reason to imagine, that "the best" is any good at all.

When I watched those two seasons of The Next Food Network Star, I kept wondering, if the contestant roster produces two, or even three, candidates who look like good bets for shows of their own, would TVFN really send everyone but the winner packing? In practice, I suspect that the problem doesn't come up because anyone who looked like a surefire candidate would be plucked out of the competition and given independent consideration; all the network is really committing to is that one of these people really and truly is going to get a show?

I suppose what in the end made MasterChef Goes Large so compelling for me was that the finalists themselves were so interesting. We got to see them under so many different conditions, and also saw their cooking develop and grow. Judges John and Gregg were always concerned with potential, always considering the room for growth and how likely they were to actually do it. In Mark's case, in particular, with his limited background, it was fascinating to watch the leaps his cooking took as he was exposed to professional criticism and instruction. (It was also interesting to learn, on the BBC website, that the MasterChef experience didn't work out that well for him. Once he discovered the kind of consuming commitment a career change would have required, he finally decided that he didn't want to do it after all. This too is real life!)

On that final episode, as judge John's comment at the top of this piece suggests, all three contestants performed wonderfully, producing a three-course meal of their own devising in two and a half hours. The format of the show dictated that there had to be a "winner." In my book they were all winners--people I was happy to have shared all that time with, and from whom I learned some fascinating lessons about people, their talents and skills and how they develop them, and how they perform under many sorts of extreme (but absolutely real) pressure.

It was a lot of fun too. Food is not only one of the most basic human needs, but one of the most basic ways we socialize and extend hospitality. ("Breaking bread" is more than a metaphor.) And John and Gregg clearly love good food. There was something infectious about the pleasure they got whenever a contestant produced some really good food, and even more so when they weren't expecting it. Sometimes it was even more fun when they were expecting it. Like in the final show, when Gregg made attempt to hide his almost desperate eagerness to taste the ravioli stuffed with foie gras and other goodies that Thomi produced as her starter course. He seemed to think they were every bit as good as he had hoped, and they made John pretty happy too.

Somehow, watching made me happy too, and I didn't even get to taste the damned ravioli.