Watching the Food Network Star Beatdown
My husband (and therefore me) has been watching The Next Food Network Star. Richard has more patience with so-called reality TV than I do; I just don't see any reality in this kind of experience. People are placed into unnatural, humiliating situations where they can only fail, so that America can criticize, ridicule, and laugh at them. There is so much that is uncomfortable about this show, I know that if Richard was not recording this travesty every week, I wouldn't watch it.
You do get sucked in - people who are getting beatdown every week have that appeal, it's the whole watching a train wreck syndrome of course - but tonight I feel compelled to comment, mostly because I think this show (and I can't single it out in particular because I really don't watch other reality shows, so perhaps they are all like this) fails to live up to its opportunity to be better than the shit that gets strewn on Fox and UPN every day of the week. The Food Network seems perfectly content to dive straight into the gutter with Maury and Jerry, when it could be trying to live up to its demographic.
Who wants to watch people put into situations they can't possibly succeed in? Do we, as a country, possess such self-hatred that we have nothing left but to mock those who fail more spectacularly than we do? This past week, contestants were asked to create a dish in half an hour using ingredients given to them, and were told they would have to then describe the dish on television. Just before they walked out to do their presentations, they were paired up and told they had to present the dish of their partner, a dish they not only knew nothing about - not what it was, not what was in it, not how it was made - but a dish they had to taste and describe in ninety seconds to a camera.
Nobody did well. Not anyone. And the criticisms leveled at the contestant were absolutely ludicrous. There's something sickening about this as entertainment. The second challenge was not a bit tamer, and only one pair managed to do a decent job, mainly because they knew their limitations and didn't try to dazzle. There is a young kid named Shawn on this show, a pure talent, and I want to cheer for him because he seems to be an intuitive chef - in some way, despite the ridiculous situation he's being put in, the fact that he is really a natural chef comes through, born, basically, to cook - but the other part of me wants to should out the SPAMalot motto: Run Away!
tags: food network, reality tv, television, the next food network star
Connie came into my life at nine. He was a school system psychologist in Bradenton, Florida, and responsible for setting up testing and therapy for me while I was in elementary school. Rosharch ink blots, speech therapy, California Achievement Tests, math trials. My mother told him secrets about me. He took my mother to dinner. He came to our tiny trailer and left doughnuts for us before he drove my mother away in a white Continental. He was the first man I knew who wore suits, ties and wingtips to work. He said he was going to fix me. He said he was going to protect all of us. I remember my two sisters and me sitting on a battered couch in a cheap trailer living room covered with a vinyl floor, and him, kneeling with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts in his hands, making promises. 
Good on 
U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant T-Bo Twiggs was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder related to combat, entered into a treatment of therapy and medications, and was sent back into combat. 