Jamie Lee Curtis Freaked The Fuck Out By 'Top Chef'
Over at the Huffington Post, celebrity blogger and self-described conscientious TV objector ("I need to admit that I don't watch TV...have never seen a single episode of Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld, American Idol..well, you get the idea." Oh, we do, former star of Anything But Love!) Jamie Lee Curtis describes how her life was changed forever upon discovering the hottest trend* in end-of-Western-civilization-as-we-know-it-television, the elimination-based reality show:
There I was trying to celebrate with my friend when my eye kept being pulled to the set on the wall. There were some chefs on the screen, all standing with their hands clasped behind their backs, at attention, as a panel of people (who are they?) told them mostly bad things about, I assume, their food.
I knew they weren't nice supportive comments as the camera was close on the chefs' faces and they looked scared and sad. They were then marched in and out as a group until one woman was asked to leave. She was crying, packing up her knives. It made me so sad and sick to watch. Why was I drawn to this? I didn't want her to lose...did I? Do I? I don't even know her. Why would I wish her harm?
I understand there are many of these shows now. All "elimination"-based and faux reality. Real like a firing squad. I understand there is a good side, a jubilant winner getting their shot at fame and fortunes, but the bulk of the watching, I gather, is some communal elimination where the audience gets a hand in the stone-throwing. It begs the question of why we feel the need to watch this. Are we all so unhappy in our own lives we need the fix of watching another human go into the gladiator ring and come out a bloody, eviscerated mess? What does Russell Crowe scream in Gladiator — "Are you not entertained"? [...]
....What other human experience can we marginalize? What are the costs to our national psyche? What does this tell our children? What is this saying about us?
In my latest book for children, Is There Really A Human Race?, I pose the question: Is life nothing but a giant competition?
If Curtis can extrapolate America's inevitable descent into a Running Man-style distopia from a single, muted installment of Top Chef (we're not even going to consider the possibility it was Hell's Kitchen), the sensitive author will probably faint dead away the first time she stumbles across the far more brutal elimination ceremony of Kid Nation and sees a homesick 9-year-old driven out into the New Mexico desert by his pint-sized peers for an inability to complete his household chores. Unfortunately, the defensive mental shutdown resulting from such a scarring experience will probably erase the entire episode from her memory, depriving us of future, amusingly outraged blog posts that build to topical plugs for her latest children's book.
