This is the unfortunate work of ATK's new Vice President of Television, Video, and Podcasts: Mark Levine. His entire Food Network career was spent stacking the slate with competition cooking shows like "Worst Cooks in America", "The Great Food Truck Race" and "Cutthroat Kitchen". He also has the inglorious honor of being the guy that thought that putting little kids in dangerous, high pressure cooking situations for TV drama was an ethical idea.
So it's no surprise that this feels very much at home with the tired, cookie-cutter content he's been churning out for well over 10 years as part of Food Network's post-instructional era. You can even see the direct lineage and combinations of ideas, concepts, and presentation taken from his earlier works.
That said, even though this is a weird, uninspired mixture of his previous programs, namely "Food Network Star" & "Cutthroat Kitchen", it doesn't work with the talent that ATK possesses and their usual on-screen personas. He's making nearly every ATK personality come off as incredibly petty and condescending; qualities that wouldn't make me vie for a job at ATK.
The contestants themselves are making the best of a weird situation but each Cutthroat-esque twist thrown their way doesn't add to the drama, it just makes things awkward as they refuse to play along with the production. I applaud them, throwing people under the bus during a job interview is never a good idea. If only the producers understood that too.
To top it all off, the promised rewards at the end of the series are confusing and make it plain that whomever wins will probably have as much lasting impact at ATK as the average Food Network Star winner had on the channel over it's 14 seasons, which is to say nearly none.
Just to drive this home, during the various confession cam segments the contestants talk not about their dreams of working under the ATK brand but what independent ventures they hope to finance using the $100K prize. I wish them the same luck that ex-ATK personalities like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt or Christopher Kimball have had after escaping ATK's clutches. Maybe they'll actually be able to win a James Beard award! :P
My advice: Stick to instructional content based around exhaustive experimentation and tough-love hardware reviews; this show is a bad look that was tired well before Mark left Food Network.
So it's no surprise that this feels very much at home with the tired, cookie-cutter content he's been churning out for well over 10 years as part of Food Network's post-instructional era. You can even see the direct lineage and combinations of ideas, concepts, and presentation taken from his earlier works.
That said, even though this is a weird, uninspired mixture of his previous programs, namely "Food Network Star" & "Cutthroat Kitchen", it doesn't work with the talent that ATK possesses and their usual on-screen personas. He's making nearly every ATK personality come off as incredibly petty and condescending; qualities that wouldn't make me vie for a job at ATK.
The contestants themselves are making the best of a weird situation but each Cutthroat-esque twist thrown their way doesn't add to the drama, it just makes things awkward as they refuse to play along with the production. I applaud them, throwing people under the bus during a job interview is never a good idea. If only the producers understood that too.
To top it all off, the promised rewards at the end of the series are confusing and make it plain that whomever wins will probably have as much lasting impact at ATK as the average Food Network Star winner had on the channel over it's 14 seasons, which is to say nearly none.
Just to drive this home, during the various confession cam segments the contestants talk not about their dreams of working under the ATK brand but what independent ventures they hope to finance using the $100K prize. I wish them the same luck that ex-ATK personalities like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt or Christopher Kimball have had after escaping ATK's clutches. Maybe they'll actually be able to win a James Beard award! :P
My advice: Stick to instructional content based around exhaustive experimentation and tough-love hardware reviews; this show is a bad look that was tired well before Mark left Food Network.