I’m a ruthless person when it comes to reality television. If it’s technically within the rules, I’m all for using it to your advantage. If that means lying about a dead grandmother or swearing on your kids or refusing to help another Amazing Race team with directions, you gotta do what you gotta do to win. That’s the whole point of being on the show. This season of Next Level Chef, however, has shown me that I do have a line, and let the record show, I think Richard Blais is on the wrong side of it.
If you aren't watching Next Level Chef and/ or didn't catch its big post Super Bowl moment a few years ago, let me give you a quick rundown of the premise, which’ll help explain why I’m so fired up. Celebrity chefs Richard Blais, Gordon Ramsay and Nyesha Arrington each start with five person teams filled with professional chefs, home cooks and social media influencers. Every week, each contestant, competing as individuals, must grab ingredients off a moving platform to prepare a dish inside an assigned kitchen that varies greatly from the others in quality. The contestant with the best dish wins immunity for their entire team, while the mentors from the two other teams must choose one of their players to put in a sudden death cook-off with the loser going home.
Sounds pretty straight forward, right? Well, historically, the mentors pick the player on their team with the worst dish to go into the sudden death cook-off, but this season, Richard Blais has decided to change strategy. Instead, he’s started picking one of his better chefs in an attempt to eliminate a weak player from one of the other teams. So, for the past two weeks, he’s rewarded the chef who has done the best or the second best on his team with the fun prize of facing elimination.
Now, if you put aside all your human emotions and look at it from Blais’ ruthless point of view, you can see where his head is at. There are two very obvious advantages to winning the sudden death cook-off. First, his team doesn’t lose any of its players. Second, his entire team gets to cook in the second best kitchen next week, while the team that lost a player has to cook in the worst kitchen. Clearly, it’s way better for everyone on your team to win, and by putting in one of your strongest chefs, your team is more likely to win.
But it’s also a slap in the face to someone on your team who just performed really well, and while winning does give that specific contestant some marginal value in being able to cook in a better kitchen the following week, it’s nowhere close to off-setting the risk of being put up for elimination. In fact, the team element of the competition is entirely discarded in the second half of each season; so, whether you enter that phase by yourself or with all your teammates, it doesn’t really affect your overall chances of winning.
Next Level Chef has made a show of dunking on Richard for not having ever had one of his contestants win a season. He’s quite clearly desperate to win this year, given his fun rivalry with the other judges, and I’ll be honest, his aggressive style makes for some entertaining television. But for most of the people on his team, this is the best chance they will ever have to win this amount of money and change their life.
To me, every player deserves to rise and fall on their own merits. They deserve a fair chance to actually win, and that means, if they cooked one of their team’s best dishes, they should be rewarded by not having to cook for their place in the competition, and if they cooked the worst dish, even if they’re more likely to go home, they should have to go into sudden death.
It would be one thing if the people he was putting into the cook-offs were on board with the strategy, but it’s quite obvious from the confessional interviews that they’re at best, very nervous and at worst, very displeased. I’m sure there’s a sense of pride when they win and a feeling of accomplishment. There’s also those marginal rewards I outlined before like getting to cook the following week in a better kitchen with better ingredients, but if Richard keeps doing this, at some point, one of them is going to go home. They’re going to lose their chance to win this competition after making a dish that should have kept them safe, and that’s going to feel really unfair.
I like Richard Blais. As a viewer, I’m really intrigued by his strategy. If I were one of the better players on his team, however, someone trying to win what’s ultimately a solo competition for the betterment of my family, someone who had made one of the best dishes of the entire day, and I was put into a sudden death cook-off because I’m more skilled than my teammate who actually cooked a bad dish, I’d be furious.
You can catch Next Level Chef on Thursday nights as part of Fox's TV schedule. It's a bit weird but also a lot of fun.
