"All long-running competition reality television shows fall into the same trap. The longer the show is on the air, the more qualified the contestants. Potential competitors watch every episode of the show that exists, they study how the game is built in order to compete not with heart or passion or instinct, but with strategy. The problem with this is that now competitors on reality television shows are masters from the beginning."
"The response to this competency, by producers and show executives, has been uniformly the same across shows: make the challenges weirder and stranger so that no one can practice for them. The fear is, I guess, that if you ask every contestant in the tent to make, for example, pain au chocolate during pastry week, the competition will be unfair because half of the contestants may have been making pain au chocolate once a week for seven years in the hopes that they might get cast"
Long-running competition reality shows attract increasingly skilled contestants who study past episodes and practice game mechanics, shifting competition toward strategy rather than instinct. Producers respond by inventing stranger, less-practicable challenges to level the field and prevent pre-training advantages. The trend assumes that practice produces consistent success, but culinary work remains inherently variable and unpredictable; identical methods can yield widely different outcomes. The rise of semi-professional contestants reduces visible failure on television and prompts ever-more unusual tasks, creating a cycle of escalation between contestant preparation and challenge novelty while underscoring that practice does not guarantee perfection in the kitchen.
Read at Defector
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]