Reality TV, or at least TV that vaguely resembles reality, takes over the podcast this week. First, Neal Pollack welcomes in Rick Ellis, from the Too Much TV sub stack, to discuss Neal's thesis that TV food competitions have reached their "decadent endgame)." Rick doesn't quite agree. His thesis is that Jeffrey Zaslav and the other Warner Brothers Discovery executives who run the Food Network have just realized they can make more profit by producing fewer episodes.
They both criticize, somewhat lightly, that Top Chef has become little more than a feeder ramp for bad Food Network shows. Rick, much to Neal's surprise, has little bad to say about 'House of Knives,' which Neal considers to be the absolute nadir of the food competition genre. Neither of them are willing to offer any praise to 'Wildcard Kitchen,' which feels phony and derivative. Regardless, this is the deepest dive into the politics and machinations of food competition TV as you're ever likely to hear anywhere.
More discussed in the zeitgeist is 'Love Is Blind),' which recently concluded its 8th season with a couple of high-profile jiltings, one at the altar itself, because the betrothed couldn't agree on politics. In both cases, it was liberal women rejecting conservative or at least apolitical men. Neal and guest Rachel Llewellyn parse what this actually portends for society. It used to be the case that people in romantic relationships could disagree on politics, at least as regards some issues. Love Is Blind is really just a symptom of a larger societal illness where people are no longer allowed to disagree. Many of them simply exist in different realities entirely. These are sad times, especially if you're competing in a cooking show against someone who you might want to marry but cannot because you hold different political opinions than they do on important issues of the day.
Enjoy the podcast!
