Top Chef is a great show because it's straight forward. It's a cooking competition show which almost entirely focuses on the cooking competition. For the most part the show is concerned only with good chefs and interesting challenges. Certainly there are some big personalities on the show or they cut the show to create big personalities but the show has never become about them. The show will play up confrontation or emotional outbursts, sometimes teasing them for an entire season, but ultimately all the dust ups are minimal and breezed over by the competitors swiftly. They are just normal moments that happen when people who don't know each other are thrown into situations with numerous unknown variables.
The show doesn't cast basket cases, doesn't deliberately throw unhinged individuals together hoping for friction. They put good chefs in interesting situations to see what they cook. The personalities of the individuals on the show come through slowly and organically. We like some of the people, we dislike others, but not because the producers predicted and designed this outcome. Of course what we see is not truth, we don't get a full sense of all these individuals, but the show is not put together to skew or slant or facilitate villainization.
I loved the first couple seasons of The Real World and Road Rules. They were great shows because they were simply real people in a situation and the camera observed. As time passed stunt casting and contrived situations turned an interesting TV show into a spectacle. Most reality shows start from that manufactured place- fake people in conflict. Top Chef has consistently steered clear of these pitfalls and focused on what it is: a show about food and the people that cook it.
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