Dr. Curnutt Serves Up Thoughts On Culinary Television

From “The Amish Mafia” to “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” it’s obvious reality television is a firmly entrenched slice of today’s cultural and entertainment landscape.  And, there are university professors to chronicle and dissect the phenomenon.  One of those scholars happens to be SCM’s Hugh Curnutt, associate professor of Communication Studies.   According to Dr. Curnutt, reality television “provides the perfect solution for networks’ ongoing quest for profitable programming that can be produced in abundance at a low cost.”  In his latest essay, “Cooking on Reality TV: Chef-Participants and Culinary Television,” which appears in a new anthology on food and media, Dr. Curnutt examines what it is like for chefs to cook on reality TV and the impact television is having on the field of haute cuisine.

Dr. Curnutt argues that the growth of culinary reality TV is part of the larger evolution of “post-network” television, which over the past decade has been due to a number of factors, beginning with the abolition of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, or fin-sin rules, in 1993, which gave networks the ability to own the programming they aired in primetime.  This, combined with the writers’ strike of 2007 and the development of cable with its myriad, and increasingly niche channels, opened the floodgates to reality television.  Reality television provided networks with the opportunity to produce lots of content at a much lower cost.  After all, you don’t need to pay actors or deal with unions, and you don’t need to pay a writer to produce a script.

On the culinary front, individual shows that featured television cooks, such as Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, have morphed into networks that provide an uninterrupted litany of cooking show after cooking show. Bravo’s reality program “Top Chef,” for example, has spawned a number of spinoffs that feature its more notable participants on programs such as  “Top Chef Masters,”  “Top Chef All Stars” and “Life After Top Chef.”  This method of repurposing, what Dr. Curnutt calls  ‘durable participants,’ is part of a larger industry trend whereby…casting ordinary people into game shows, docusoaps and reality TV enables television producers to “grow their own” celebrities and to control how they are marketed before, during, and after production.

Much of Dr. Curnutt’s essay is based upon the experiences of Wiley Dufresne, a well-known and highly regarded chef and restaurateur, who has appeared on “After Hours with Daniel,”  “Iron Chef,” “Top Chef,” “Top Chef All-Stars,” and “Top Chef Masters.”

Even though we may be living in a golden age of reality television, Charles B. Slocum of the Writers Guild of America West, points out that television has always had ordinary people on television.   Allen Funt, with his 1948 TV series “Candid Camera” is often credited as reality TV’s first practitioner…”Truth or Consequences” started in 1950 and frequently used secret cameras. Both of these series created artificial realties to see how ordinary people would respond; the reality series of today borrow a lot from these precedents and differ mostly in scope and locale. MTV was the first network to take advantage of the eradication of the financial regulations and create its own content, “The Real World,” which made its television debut on May 21, 1992.

Finally, Dr. Curnutt puts forth an interesting reality television paradox. “People enjoy witnessing the behind-the-scenes lives of celebrities. They want to know what their favorite star looks like when they’re at their most authentic.  They want to see the performer being a real person,” says Dr. Curnutt.  “But, when reality participants become celebrities for often simply being themselves, what exactly are you looking at – a celebrity or an ordinary person?”