Amateur Cooking Shows: The Last Bastion of Credible Reality TV

I went home from work sick this morning and all day I watched Worst Cooks In America. Maybe because of the cold medicine, my eroded immune system, or my borderline ecstatic lethargy I found the show really engaging. The people were real and there was no drama, just normal people learning(to various degrees of success) to cook.

Reality TV pioneers Real World and the subsequent sister spin off Road Rules were successful not because they mirrored the emotional turmoil of network dramas but because they lacked it. Those shows captured real people, in both real(in the case of Real World) and heightened(in the case of Road Rules) but neither we're completely manufactured, and if they were structured they were not done so to create interpersonal conflict. In the beginning individuals were cast for personality rather than how unstable they were. As both franchises gained momentum Reality TV turned into a broad and viable genre. The shows being created became more and more produced, constructed, scripted. Eventually they all felt the same, fake.

Along came Top Chef which was refreshing in that it was about the food and not the drama but it quickly fell prey to manufacturing conflict and heightening action with musical stingers just like every other over wrought reality show. Now the only reality left in Reality TV is found in amateur cooking shows like Worst Cooks In America, MasterChef Jr., and The Great British Bake Off. Where the creators cast real people based on merit(or lack there of) and not on the unstable nature of their personality. Where the focus is on ability, challenge, and execution rather than interpersonal spectacle. When volatile people aren't involved typically people get along. And it's pleasing to watch people be nice to one another.