Reality Television

I was watching the reality series ”The Next Food Network Star” last night when I realized that this program is more than just another reality show/endurance contest; it’s actually a complete paradigm shift from the average reality show – to a highly superior business model.

Now, let me state for the record, I don’t watch reality shows; I feel they have a level of bogus-ness normally associated only with Disney theme parks. I mean, how can a person (or a group of people) actually be experiencing “dangerous, wildness survival conditions” when there are three cameramen, two sound guys, a producer, and a helicopter following them around? The Jungle Ride at Disneyland was more realistic than that, and you could see the hydraulic actuators on the hippos!

I also don’t watch cooking shows. Or, as I like to call them, “shows about people who can cook way better than you.” The fact is that, like most Americans, I could probably go to culinary school, practice cooking for decades, and invest the Gross Domestic Product of Sweden in appliances and equipment, and I still couldn’t produce anything that would look (or taste) like what you see on cooking shows. I lack the talent, the patience, and the small army of assistants, producers, special effects technicians, and stagehands that goes into one of these shows.

But last night my wife was watching the above-mentioned Food Network show, and I was too unmotivated to go work watch something else, so I amused myself by watching the show and making snide, MBA-graduate-type comments about the planning, organizational and management problems that the team leaders were having on the show. “That’s another place where having one less cook and one more management scientist on their team would have come in handy!” I would chuckle; when one of the cooking teams failed to put half of the items they needed on their shopping list before their one allowed trip to the market.

My wife just smiled and went on watching the show. God only knows how she puts up with me, and frankly, I don’t care as long as she does…

But the point is, the contestants in this public humiliation are not just competing for money, prizes, or even future earnings. The winner of this show gets their own cooking show on the Food Network, and if that pans out well, possibly additional series and specials for the Network as well! Think about that for a minute. When any of the other networks broadcast “reality” shows, all they get out of it is ratings, and then only if people turn in to watch. Once the show is over, the network gains no other benefit, because the winner will just go off to enjoy the prizes while the losers write tell-all books and plot bloody revenge. There’s even another cooking-based reality show (”Hell’s Kitchen” on Fox), and the winner of that gets to be the Executive Chef of their own restaurant – still no benefit to the network.

Food Network is getting all of the benefit of any other “reality” show – competition, backbiting, cat-fighting, name-calling, public humiliation, and so on, but they’re also recruiting their next on-air personality. If the winner is a success on television they could quite possibly earn millions of dollars, launch their own restaurants and consumer product lines, become famous, be invited to the White House, run for Pope, or whatever it is they want to do – certainly a much better prize than a million or so pre-tax dollars, and they get to do the whole contest in a nice, clean, professional kitchen instead of some rat-infested hellhole of a tropical island. But the real winner is the Food Network, which will make millions every week selling advertising time on the winning contestant’s new show, plus the revenue from tie-in merchandising, promotional appearances, and whatever else they decide to use their new on-air personality for.

It’s brilliant thinking, and I hope that the people at the Food Network have rewarded whoever came up with the concept appropriately. Maybe they could give him or her a show on their network…