kickin' summer off!
2005-05-30

Because I have time weighing heavy on my hands, I've decided to start writing my really personal thoughts in here. Not things about my Horrible Life or my shoes, rather I give the world:

Summer Special 2005: What I Watched on My Summer Vacation

But you don't have a vacation, -? you may ask. (The - is because you don't know my name, or if you do, fill in the blank in your head, I'm not putting my info to this.) Well, it's like I do, so what better way to fill my time than with blather about what I am watching on TV?

Let's begin!

"Hell's Kitchen"

My brother wanted to see this, which immediately made me curious as he never watches non-sports TV. The concept for those uninitiated is that people run round a kitchen and eventually if they don't fuck up too badly they win a prize! And also there's a mean judge in the form of Gordon Ramsay who surprise surprise, did this in Britain beforehand!

The point of most reality shows is to get people to do stupid things in order to win a prize, but since this is a summer show the prize is especially spurious: the winner gets to "open their own restaurant." Really? What does that mean? Never mind, it is a prize and people are fighting for it.

Or are they? The whole point of shows like this is to watch carefully selected loudmouths go at each other. Even something as "personality"-centered as "The Apprentice" has at least ten Trump-free minutes where the contestants are free to act like asses all by themselves. Unfortunately somebody thought that the draw here was not the contestants but the "personality," so there is a lot of cussing from Ramsay while the contestants fade into a quivering blob of "Yes sir!" Ramsay storms around, for because of his accent he is automatically cruel in an interesting way, like Simon Cowell or the Weakest Link woman, despite having a full head of feathered Sun Streaked hair. It is fun to watch the "fucking" blurred out on Ramsay's mouth, though, presumably to protect deaf children...

Most of the show is taken up with cooking and screaming, intercut with shots of sad famewhores pretending to be upset about not getting their food so they can get on the camera. If you ever want to see a badly staged conversation between a fake restaurant patron and a waiter, here is your show and I command you to watch!

Anyway at the end the food is bad (it's never specified what is being cooked, it's just bad) and Punishment Must Be Doled Out. Ramsay picks one of the slightly more interesting women from the losing team and tells her to nominate two people to go to the boardroom... oh, to be fired, or whatever. There's some sort of twist that seems to have been set up by the producers way in advance, and then the shocking, crappy-copy-of-Mark-Burnett ending. For some reason everything looks terribly washed out and cheap, probably because it is very cheap.

Watching "Hell's Kitchen" made me more depressed about all aspects of life, not just in a personal "I watched this show and wrote about it too" sort of way but even to a point where I began to feel despair about the state of the world. Like, you know, aliens are probably watching this shit, and judging us, etc.... This is cosmically important! Really!

Fun Fact: Hell's Kitchen is also the name of a NYC neighborhood, which used to be full of factories and grimy urchins but is now more famous for being the site of the proposed West Side Stadium. Learn more about Hell's Kitchen today!

Correction: Apparently the "diners" are not prodded to act out in any way and go in absolutely cold, or at least as absolutely cold as you can be going into a reality tv show restaurant. Which makes it sadder, because it's like they already had deep genetic knowledge of how to act for the camera...