telefetish: September 2007 Archives

You have to understand that, for whatever reason, I think of NBC as my "home" channel. When I go back to Iowa to visit, we still watch the NBC affiliate for local news. KWQC cares for me, after all.

Anyhow, I don't know that they're necessarily any denser when it comes to dealing with cable and net than the other biggies, but I seem to notice it more quickly. And so, when they do something right, it's only fair that I point that out too. To my surprise this week, I discovered that the pilots for all of NBC's new fall shows were being offered for free on one of our OnDemand channels. So I've already seen the first episodes of Bionic Woman, Chuck, and Life, and I'll probably give Journeyman a try this weekend.

The only one I was guaranteed to watch was BW, which is done by the same folks who brought us the BSG reboot, but after having seen the others, I might give one or two of them a try as well. And that's how it's supposed to work, I think.

I neglected to mention last week that I had a Top Chef dream. I don't remember much of it anymore, except to note that I was a Season 3 contestant, but somehow got bailed out of totally misunderstanding a challenge by Season 2's Elia.

Anyhow, my top picks keep losing. At the beginning of the season, if I had had to pick who I thought would make it to the final 4, I would have chosen CJ, Tre, Lia, and Hung. And as I mentioned to Derek today, if you gave me Tre, Lia, and CJ, I'd put that team up against any combo of the folk who are left.

It's been a weird season, and no one's rise to "success" has been more symptomatic of that than Brian, I think. You'll recall that, during the after-party challenge, he spent most of his time grabbing customers. During the 2 weeks of restaurant wars, he was in the front. And on the boat, he was coordinating most of the time. What saved him last night from elimination was the Dread Broccolini. By my count, that's like 4 or 5 episodes in a row where he hasn't exactly earned the right to stay on the show. And now he's one elim away from the final 4? Hmm. It's not that I don't like him or anything, but I'd have a tough time arguing that he's a better chef than those who've packed up their knives and gone.

We'll see, I suppose.

As luck would have it, there was a mini-marathon of Ramsay's show on BBC America on Monday, and so I put it on in the background for a few hours as I read. And as a result, I am now prepared to offer to you the 5 Golden Gordon Rules of Resuscitating Restaurants:

1. A restaurant is a business, not a family, a hobby, a lounge, a home, or anything other than a business.

2. Quality is far more important than novelty (I suspect that Ramsay wants to kill the person who coined the phrase "Wow factor").

3. Traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic. Oh, and traffic.

4. Five adjectives that should describe the food: local, organic, rustic, clean, honest.

5. Finally, in a bad situation, there is almost inevitably one or more persons whose talent is going unexploited, and one or more persons whose talents are wildly overestimated. Kitchen nightmares are made, not born.

That comes close to summing up most of the episodes I've seen, only with a lot more swearing and bleeping, although BBC America doesn't, apparently, find "shithole" a necessary bleep. More than one episode demonstrates this fact.

That is all.