"Chopped" is a travesty

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• I kind of hate Ted Allen. He has no personality, at least on this show, and I don't have any reason to believe he knows about food in the same way that even a Tom Colicchio would.
  
• It's obvious that this is a Top Chef knock-off. It was bad enough when they had "Next Food Network Star," which sucked, but at least was right for Food Network. The skills it tested were more associated the warm nonsense that Food Network goes for than actual cooking. This show purports to be about actual top-level cooking, which is why is fails. That's simply not what Food Network is about, it's about home cooking.
• The ingredients are mostly things a Food Network viewer might find at home. It might seem cute and appeal to some, but it just seems contrived and weird to restrict real chefs in this way.
• Dessert is the final showdown between the last two contestants. Really? Something real chefs apparently don't really focus on at all is the last task?
• Because there are new chefs on every episode, you don't get to know them, so it ends up being another personality-less affair, like Food Network Challenge. At least on shows like Throwdown, you can learn to love to hate Bobby Flay.
• There's really only room in my life for one food competition show, and even that one spot has been being squeezed recently by the poor quality of Top Chef this season. Sorry Chopped.
  

A Pedestrian Post-Colonial Observation

Watching Toby Young on Top Chef the other day got me thinking. One common trope in reality television is the use of a panel of experts that judge a contestant's worth, eliminating one person every week. Within that trope, it's incredibly common to see at least one of the judges be English. I think everyone can name a few. This phenomenon isn't restricted to reality television, as television authority figures of all types come in the English persuasion. (A particularly curious sub-archetype often recalls a dominatrix, but that's a digression for another day.) However, English reality judges are the most common.

I think that the prevalence of these characters sheds light on an underlying patriarchal relationship between Americans and English. We've heard since we were born that they used to rule us, we used to be them, and that we broke away to be more independent, more rugged, and more free. But the English still held the mantle of taste, refinement, and pure blood, in contrast to our messy, crass melting pot. (I should note that, of course, I realize this isn't the reality, but just a perception dominant in mass culture. I love multi-culturalism and Britain is almost as heterogeneous as we are anyway.)

In our secondary role, we still aspire to access that thing long lost from our cultural heritage, the link to royalty and aristocracy through the English. They know what's best. They're our cultural parents. Every truly bourgeois family has links via the Mayflower the old country. So who's better to yell at us, belittle us, and show us exactly how short we have fallen from their lofty standards?