The Trashy Genius of Hell’s Kitchen
I should be above watching Hell’s Kitchen. I call it a guilty pleasure, but in the back of my mind I know that I should really be spending my time watching legitimate documentaries – Titicut Follies, Hoop Dreams, Searching for Sugarman, etc. instead of the overly-dramatic, overly-edited, and partly-staged reality show that is Hell’s Kitchen. Hosted by celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, Hell’s Kitchen truly is the perfect example of the American reality competition show. It’s no different from a show like The Apprentice – the main difference is the subject matter. While contestants on The Apprentice are aspiring entrepreneurs who must undergo various challenges related to running businesses and navigating the stock market under the careful watch of an intimidating, well-established teacher (in this case, businessman, xenophobe, and sexual predator Donald Trump – or, in the failed reboot that aired after the election, Arnold Schwarzenegger for some reason), Hell’s Kitchen is formatted in essentially the same way – just replace the business arts with the culinary.
Each contestant is an aspiring chef who must prove themselves to Gordon Ramsay – a British chef who first gained international attention after being featured in London Weekend Television’s 1999 documentary miniseries Boiling Point, which featured him screaming at and emotionally abusing the cooks who worked at his fine dining restaurant – by proving themselves over the course of a several week-long competition, all of which is documented by semi-hidden cameras fixed throughout the restaurant (I’m sure the contestants know the cameras are there, but often forget they’re there, which is exactly what the creators of the show want). The winner, who is the last-man-standing after the rest of the contestants are personally sent home by Ramsay in a Survivor-like elimination process – is given a lucrative job as head chef at one of Ramsay’s several fine-dining establishments – usually an upper-class casino or resort.
From a filmmaking perspective, the show is objectively not good, and its faults can easily be found just by watching a single episode. It is extremely overly edited, with cheesy music cues that come in every few seconds to tell the viewer how to feel about a particular situation. Each episode is as formulaic as it gets, and each one is framed almost exactly the same as the last.
The Formula
First, there is a recap of what happened in the previous episode, and then all the chefs walk into the restaurant – which is literally called Hell’s Kitchen – to listen to an obviously pre-written speech given to them by Ramsay. At the beginning of each season, the contestants are divided by sex into two teams – the women are placed in the Red Team, the men in the Blue. Later in each season, as the number of contestants goes down, Ramsay will sometimes assign a woman to be on the men’s team, or vice-versa – but other than that, most of the show has a very apparent “boys vs girls” mentality, another theme likely adapted from The Apprentice.
There is then a challenge that tests some kind of cooking skill, such as fileting and de-boning a fish, boiling and dismantling lobster, or even a blind taste test administered by Ramsay to test each contestant’s palette. The team that wins the daily challenge are given a lucrative prize such as a spa day or a night on the town in Las Vegas – the losing team is given a punishment that can include anything from taking out the restaurant’s trash to being forced to eat gross foods such as cow’s tongue or pig’s tail.
After that, it’s time for what truly makes Hell’s Kitchen stand out from all other reality shows, and by far the part that most people tune in for: the dinner service. Each night, dozens of actors go to Hell’s Kitchen for a night of fine dining that is obviously paid for by the network. After watching several seasons of Hell’s Kitchen, I can assure you that, despite Ramsay and the contestants’ claims, no one ever really loses money on the show – a contestant could set every single filet mignon in the kitchen on fire, but it doesn’t really matter, as it’s all fully covered beforehand in the show’s budget; and with the immense popularity the show had in its prime, I can imagine the network only saw profit from ruined food.
This is the part where each episode becomes more intense and much more entertaining, thanks to what Chef Ramsay does best (besides cook) – scream at and personally insult each cook when they make a mistake (“I’m sorry, chef, I thought cold water boiled faster.”) And in his defense, each contestant (who, in their defense, is often under extreme stress and pressure) makes stupid mistakes, such as undercooking meat, burning simple foods like rice or fried eggs, or in one episode cooking crab that had been left out of the refrigerator overnight (“You’ll kill someone!!!” is one of my personal favorite Ramsay catchphrases).
The dinner service section of each episode can go in one of a few different ways. The first few episodes always have the weakest dinner services – most of the time Ramsay shuts the restaurant down before the service is even over – and this reveals a major flaw in the show. The first half or so of each season is by far the most entertaining, but as the season goes on and Ramsay boots the undesirable (aka fun to watch) chefs off the show, the dinner services naturally grow smoother, resulting in a far less angry Ramsay and, unfortunately, a slightly less entertaining show.
After the halfway point of each season, there are fewer cooks in the kitchen, giving the audience more room to get to know each contestant on a more personal level. Depending on the season, the show starts with anywhere from twelve to twenty contestants – most of whom are complete assholes – but at that stage you’re not supposed to relate with each individual person – the entertainment comes from Gordon Ramsay screaming at everyone. At least one contestant is eliminated per episode, but in extreme circumstances Ramsay will make an executive decision and throw a particularly aggravating cook out of the kitchen and likewise the show, often during the height of an intense dinner service; whether he does this on his own free will or if he’s instructed to by the network is up for debate. Either way, by the time the season gets to the midway point, Ramsay has generally eliminated the bad cooks and is left with the more serious, promising contestants. While there are some blow-ups from Ramsay that the audience can look forward to, at this point the show is more or less about the individual, as shallow and flat-out unlikable as they often are.
In the last few episodes of each season, the elimination process becomes a more difficult choice for Ramsay, as he often grows attached to each contestant, and legitimately doesn’t want to send one home. Eliminations are usually opportunities to laugh at whichever chef gets booted off (despite them likely being a far superior cook than the viewer is and ever will be) but at the end of the season the eliminations become something of a Sophie’s Choice for Ramsay, and usually results in tears and words of encouragement from the heartbroken host. (Again, whether Ramsay is actually heartbroken or if it’s just a network mandate is up for debate).
From then, rinse and repeat throughout the season until the last episode, where the two finalists are put in charge of their own kitchen, staffed by the last six eliminated contestants. The finalist who performs the best during this final dinner service (which at this point unfortunately contains almost no yelling from Ramsay) is declared the winner and given the dream job. A few months later, the next season begins, and we start the process all over again.
The History of Hell’s Kitchen, Part One
The fundamental key to the show is Chef Gordon Ramsay, who I believe is the sole reason the show continues to air new episodes to this day (though ratings are dwindling compared to when the show first started in 2005 – and now that Disney owns the Fox Network, the future of the show is unreliable at best). Whether you agree with Ramsay’s extreme management style or not, no one can deny that the man has natural charm, and is extremely likable when he’s not pissed off. Hell, even when he is pissed off, you can’t help but side with him, especially knowing his background and work ethics.
My first introduction to Gordon Ramsay and Hell’s Kitchen came from watching commercials during what was then the most popular reality show at the time – and remains one of, if not the most successful reality shows in the history of television – American Idol, which was also owned by the Fox Network. One of the major attractions of the show was judge Simon Cowell, a British hard-ass who wasn’t afraid to speak the honest truth directly to the contestants’ faces, whether the other judges and/or the audience agreed with him or not. It’s clear that the Fox Network saw marketability from this new kind of archetype, and by 2004, only two years after the smash-hit success that was season one of American Idol, had gone to the farthest possible end of the spectrum in the form of Gordon Ramsay, who at the time was working on the original Hell’s Kitchen; yes, like most popular American shows, Hell’s Kitchen was adapted from a program that originally aired in the UK.
Watching the UK version of Hell’s Kitchen after watching several seasons of the American is comical. The styles of the two shows are so dramatically different from one another, and the differences make themselves apparent right from the get-go. The UK Hell’s Kitchen is far more restrained and is more like an actual documentary one would watch in a movie theater than a reality TV show. There is little to no music whatsoever, and unlike the American version, it feels real – so real that it’s almost boring.
“Good evening, and welcome, live[1], to Hell’s Kitchen,” announces a stereotypically English host that was cut from the American version for, most likely, pacing reasons, “The doors opened here just about ninety minutes ago and already, the atmosphere is charged with drama, glamour, and an almost embarrassing sense of excitement.” As if the host wasn’t blunt enough already, he continues, “As you can see, some of the biggest names…in show business are all here, drawn by the words ‘Free Dinner’.” I really appreciate how open the UK version is about it being a game show – within in the first minute they already are admitting to drawing fake customers in with free gourmet food – a characteristic I think the American version desperately needs. Everyone knows (I hope) that reality shows often aren’t entirely, well, reality – and when a reality show breaks the fourth wall in that way (a distressed person yelling “Get that camera out of my face!”), I personally find that it makes the show not only more enjoyable, but it feels so much realer.
It was surprising to me to find that the first season of UK Hell’s Kitchen isn’t even that much of a competition – while there is an elimination process that results in one winning contestant at the end of the season, the main premise is that Ramsay “hires” ten British celebrities, most of whom having no prior cooking experience whatsoever – to work in his “restaurant”. Subsequent seasons of UK Hell’s Kitchen would adapt the competition format of the American version, though this and the departure of Ramsay – who had left to be on the American Hell’s Kitchen – would prove to be fatal mistakes, as the show only lasted three more seasons.
Hell’s Kitchen was a major steppingstone in Gordon Ramsay’s career as a celebrity chef. Many people outside of the UK had never heard of him before the show aired, but his extreme temper and creatively British style of cursing and berating contestants instantly made him a household name. Growing up in a fairly religious Catholic household meant that swear words of any kind – especially the word “hell” – was strictly forbidden, at least until I reached my late teens and my parents realized I wasn’t really cut out for the whole conservative life anyway; but back when I was a good, well-behaved Catholic boy, I wasn’t even allowed to say the title of the show, let alone watch it. My parents had only started to allow me to watch SpongeBob SquarePants when I was about eight years old, so I didn’t want to push my luck with Hell’s Kitchen (Not only that, but the show aired at 9pm, which was far past my bedtime). Until recently, the show was something that seemed to be out of my sight, something I could only catch a glimpse of during commercials. Another aspect of my household, however, would end up attracting me to Gordon Ramsay when I was a bit older.
My parents, despite being perhaps a little too protective of me when it came to consuming media (At age ten I had to grovel before my father, begging him to let me watch the PG-13 rated Star Wars Episode III), were and are extremely caring and devoted parents, who are both big believers in family-style home cooking. Growing up, my parents rarely took the family out to eat, defying the norm for many American families at the time. Statistics from the mid-2000s show that the average American family would eat out, on average, around three times a week – my family ate out, at most, about once or twice a month. This isn’t me complaining at all – in fact, it’s the best decision my parents could have made. As a result of cooking at home, my brothers and I were much healthier than many of our friends, and our bond as a family grew because of home-style dining. To this day my parents still try to maintain that family dinner standard, though it is much harder now that I’m away at college for much of the year, and my two younger brothers both have sports and other commitments that often keep them out of the house until late at night. Regardless, cooking was an essential part of my childhood, and even as a kid I would want to help out with the cooking in any way I could. Despite being a film major and wanting to spend my life writing screenplays (and directing if I’m lucky), cooking is a big hobby of mine, and something that lately I’ve been wanting to hone my skills in, even if it’s only home cooking, which led to my re-discovery of Gordon Ramsay.
The Real Gordon Ramsay
Despite how much I’ve been writing about it, Hell’s Kitchen wasn’t the first Gordon Ramsay-related media I consumed. My first reintroduction to him as an adult was on his personal YouTube channel, where he posts TV-quality instructional cooking videos. As a kid, all I ever saw of Ramsay were brief clips of him screaming in Hell’s Kitchen promos, but his instructional videos show a Gordon Ramsay who is reserved, respectful, quiet – one would even say a true gentleman. Bed-ridden with a case of mono that I caught at the end of sophomore year, I spent a lot of time watching Gordon Ramsay content, especially YouTube uploads of episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, another one of Ramsay’s UK projects that was turned into another overly edited, partly staged reality show by the Fox Network.
In short, the premise of Kitchen Nightmares is that Gordon Ramsay travels across America to help struggling restaurants. This show, too, is entirely formulaic and predictable, with each episode following a strict list of required beats and moments that must occur. Ramsay starts out by entering the restaurant and ordering some food. The owners, who will almost always make complete asses of themselves before the episode ends, serve him the food and usually end up arguing with him when he tells them how bad it is. After going through the restaurant’s kitchen and food storage facilities – which are often filled with rancid meat and rotting vegetables – Gordon then observes a dinner service, which usually results in him screaming at one or more people, before he works with the owners and staff, redesigns the restaurant and menu, and observes one more dinner service to make sure that everyone can work as a team (for the sake of the episode they do, though a quick Google search usually shows that most of the restaurants shut down shortly after filming ended).
If one can look past the predictable, formulaic, and often dishonest nature of the series, they will find that it is actually critical in understanding who Gordon Ramsay is as a person. Despite what his shows’ ads may want you to believe, he is a true gentleman, a man who minds his Ps and Qs. He is always kind, pleasant, and respectful, especially to people he’s meeting for the first time. Even if he walks into the most hideously grimy restaurant you’ve ever seen, he always shakes the owners’ hands, speaks to them politely and with respect, and is never rude or unpleasant unless someone is rude or unpleasant to him first. Even when he eliminates contestants on Hell’s Kitchen, he is almost always kind and encouraging to them, personally thanking them for being on the show and wishing them a good night before they walk through the doors and off the show.
As a chef, Ramsay has impeccably high standards. When watching Boiling Point, the documentary that first introduced him to the non-culinary world, you can see that Ramsay cares deeply about his food and his customers’ experiences. He is certainly a blunt man, especially when in the kitchen, and only gets as angry as he does when people don’t meet his standards. Working in a kitchen is an inherently high-stress environment (I got a brief first-hand taste of this at my first high school job waiting tables at the dining room of a local retirement home), and screaming and insulting people who don’t meet his standards is Ramsay’s way of dealing with the stress. Whether you agree with his management style or not, no one can deny that Ramsay doesn’t necessarily want to scream and be angry; it’s how he gets his food to the standards he wants it at, as quickly as possible. He is a gentleman first, an angry monster only when people get between him and his food. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to taste any of Ramsay’s food myself (I’m a college student, I can’t afford to blow a hundred or more dollars in a fine dining restaurant, though it’s certainly on my bucket list), at home I have cooked some of the recipes he teaches on his YouTube channel, and I think they’re absolutely delicious (barring the few mistakes I was responsible for).
As an amateur cook (and I can’t stress the word “amateur” enough), Ramsay is a big inspiration of mine, though I sometimes wish he didn’t spend so much time being on TV. Other than Hell’s Kitchen, which he still hosts after eighteen seasons, Ramsay hosts Kitchen Nightmares, The F Word, Hotel Hell, MasterChef, and MasterChef Junior, as well as appearances on dozens of talk shows and guest appearances on other cooking shows – and that’s only in America. I would love to sit down with him one day and just talk about his life – I truly have no idea where he finds the time to be on all of these shows, travel across the world, write and publish memoirs and cookbooks, manage his own restaurants, make videos for his YouTube channel, and still have time to raise four teenagers and a newborn. It makes me think back to Boiling Point – which is a legitimately entertaining and informative documentary that I would recommend to anyone – a film that Ramsay had no involvement in other than being the main subject.
“I’m not a celebrity chef,” Gordon said in an interview featured in the documentary, “Let’s get that right. I mean, that’s Brian Turner and Gary Rose, they’re celebrity chefs. I mean – let’s get it right, I’m a cook, and I enjoy cooking, and I’m not interested in signing a multi-million-pound deal that I can conduct a kitchen from an office, I want to continue cooking.” To put the quote in full context, this was back when few people outside of Britain’s culinary world knew who Ramsay was, though it would seem that his mood changed since the documentary was released, as he is now quite possibly the most famous celebrity chef of all time.
Ramsay definitely knows how to act in front of a camera, and he understands how to host a show and keep the audience engaged, even when he’s not yelling at people. His YouTube videos contain just him and his food – there is no one else in the room to bounce off of – and they’re among the best, most informative, and generally well-made videos I’ve seen on YouTube. Each one is only a few minutes long, but in that time span Gordon makes his love and devotion for cooking so apparent it’s infectious. As soon as it’s over you just want to run in your kitchen and start cooking something yourself. Perhaps that’s why he decided to become a celebrity chef – he wants to show people not only how to cook, but that they can cook. It’s natural that he wouldn’t want to stay in the same exact kitchen for his entire life. He clearly has a steady and likely sizable flow of income from all of these projects, and if he’s spreading passion to the people who watch him, perhaps it’s the best thing he could be doing.
Which brings us back to Hell’s Kitchen, and more importantly why I refer to it as “trashy genius”. The American version of the show is executive produced by Ramsay and two others – Arthur Smith and Kent Weed. I can only assume that Smith and Weed are the true creators of the show, and the ones responsible for making Hell’s Kitchen the way it is.
Arthur Smith, after spending decades working in Canadian sports broadcasting, started his own production company, A. Smith & Co., in 2000, partnering up with game show director Kent Weed to produce original reality and competition programming. Weed, who had gained national success for creating and directing game shows such as Pure Fantasy and Made in the USA, was at this point an expert in crafting the perfect game show formula – and with Smith’s connections with the Fox Network he made when he was vice-president of sports broadcasting, the duo were in the perfect position the produce a major network reality show – thankfully, around the same time, the network discovered Gordon Ramsay and the success he was having in the UK – and the rest, as they say, is history.
Information about the development and production of Hell’s Kitchen is sparse, and much of the conclusions I have drawn are largely theoretical, based on my observations of the show itself and my prior knowledge of how movies and TV shows are made. There are a few interviews from Ramsay and some of the contestants on the show that give some insight into this, but I imagine most or all of the people involved with the show were made to sign strict non-disclosure agreements, sealing many of the behind-the-scenes secrets. However, I believe there’s enough evidence just from watching the show and reading what little information about the production there is to analyze and make a case for why the sub-par filmmaking of the show may, in fact, be entirely intentional.
A Brief Lesson in Film Editing
The most glaring problem with Hell’s Kitchen is the editing. The show’s IMDB page lists nearly a hundred editors who have worked on the show over the years – some, like Andrew Fialkowski and Jason Thompson, have been around since the beginning, and while Thompson left the show in 2012, Fialkowski has been editing Hell’s Kitchen since 2008 and continues to this day. He is responsible for editing eighty-four episodes of Hell’s Kitchen over the course of the past eleven years.
In short, the average shot length – or ASL – of the show is unbelievable. For comparison’s sake, I calculated the average shot length for the first sixty seconds of the most popular clip on the official Hell’s Kitchen YouTube channel – entitled “Executive Chef Serves RAW SALMON to Gordon Ramsay” – which as of this writing has 9.2 million views. In the first sixty seconds of the clip alone, there are thirty-six cuts, and the average length of each shot is a staggering half a second. In comparison, the average modern documentary has roughly five hundred shots; assuming the average documentary feature is around ninety minutes, the ASL for a modern documentary is about five seconds.
The average shot length of the American Hell’s Kitchen is baffling compared to the UK. The first sixty seconds of the first episode (starting after the opening credits) has a grand total of – prepare to be shocked – four cuts (remembering the American version had thirty-six). The average shot length of the UK Hell’s Kitchen clip? Fifteen seconds, thirty times longer than the American.
Why the enormous difference in shot lengths? As a whole, the average shot lengths for film and television have been steadily decreasing over the past several decades. In 1930, the average shot length for an English language film was twelve seconds – today, it is only about two and a half. Since the 1940s, Hollywood have been dominating the English language film world, and, in terms of profit, America has the most successful film industry in the world, grossing more than ten billion dollars in 2017.
Hollywood directors may be the key to discovering why the average shot length of films have gone down over the years. John Ford’s films, which were most popular from the 30s to the early 60s, have an ASL of 9.7 seconds. Alfred Hitchcock, while he was originally a British director, was one of the most prominent and well-known of the 50s and 60s. The average shot length in his films is around 9.1 seconds. In 1975, a young new director named Steven Spielberg crashed onto the scene with his smash-hit film Jaws – a film so massively successful that it actually resulted in the invention of the term “blockbuster”. Spielberg’s average shot length over the course of his career rests at around 6.5 seconds. Now, Michael Bay, one of the most successful – and controversial – Hollywood directors of the 90s and 2000s, has an average shot length of just three seconds. Love them or hate them (most choose the latter), Bay’s blockbusters – especially his hugely financially successful Transformers series – have changed not just American films, but the entire world film industry.
It seems that, over the years, Americans require shorter and shorter shot lengths to maintain their attention. While there are successful films with long ASLs, such as Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s films Birdman and The Revenant, the typical Hollywood blockbuster has shorter and shorter shot lengths. It would appear that Hell’s Kitchen producers Arthur Smith and Kent Weed understand this perfectly, and I would go so far as to hypothesize encourage the short shot length of the series.
The Grand Scheme of Things
In defense of the editors, Hell’s Kitchen does not seem like an easy show to edit. In addition to the show’s camera crew, there are multiple fixed cameras, usually attached to the ceiling, placed all throughout the restaurant in order to film the kitchen during dinner service without getting in the way of the cooks.
From watching the show, I would have to guess that there has to be at least thirty or so fixed cameras placed all throughout the restaurant, which was built in an abandoned warehouse somewhere outside of Los Angeles. In addition to the cameras installed in the ceiling of the kitchen, there are also cameras in the contestants’ dorms on the second story, installed in order to capture any personal drama that may erupt between them. The competition lasts for – I’m making an educated guess based on hints given in the episodes – at least a month. Applying simple multiplication – if there are around thirty fixed cameras, plus a camera crew, filming almost non-stop for at least one month – there must be days and days of rough footage that the editors have to not only sift through, but edit into a cohesive and entertaining narrative – a daunting task for any editor, no matter how well they may have done in film school.
As I stated earlier, Hell’s Kitchen is one of the most formulaic and predictable reality shows I’ve ever seen – yet it is so goddamn entertaining. Maybe it’s my own personal interest in cooking that keeps me watching, but that doesn’t explain the immense popularity the show had in its heyday. The first episode of season four debuted to more than ten million people across the country.
Works Cited
Miller, Greg. “Data from a Century of Cinema Reveals How Movies Have Evolved”. Wired,
https://www.wired.com/2014/09/cinema-is-evolving/ Accessed May 27th, 2019
“Top 5 Largest Film Industries in the World”. Tufilamu Pictures.
http://www.tufilamupictures.com/top-five-largest-film-industries-world/ . Accessed May 27th, 2019
Saad, Lydia. “Americans’ Dining-Out Frequency Little Changed From 2008”. Gallup,
https://news.gallup.com/poll/201710/americans-dining-frequency-little-changed-2008.aspx
Accessed May 28, 2019
Nath, David and Graham, Tim (Producers). 1999. Boiling Point. United Kingdom: London Weekend
Television.
[1] I have no idea why the host said this, as it is obvious that everything in the show is pre-taped, edited footage
