"reality" news and stories

The annoying thing about starting up a new season of a show like Bravo's Top Chef is that you have to learn all about a whole new cast of characters. It is fun to watch fifteen new contestants - three more than last season - compete in the various challenges, but it is awfully hard to keep track of them all as the show finds its stride and you don't get invested in the characters until the cast has been narrowed down a bit.

That being said, the cast seems like a fairly talented bunch this time around according to their credentials. But that can all change once they move into the Los Angeles loft that they share and get in front of the cameras in the kitchen.

MasterChef Goes Large is coming to BBC America this fall, giving food-loving US viewers a chance to check out a great British reality show. The show is a remake of an older, more subdued British show, simply called MasterChef, and is a culinary competition that challenges amateur cooks to face off against each other to see who is the Master Chef - sort of like Top Chef, only with a seemingly greater emphasis on sheer culinary skill, passion and talent and less on interpersonal conflicts. At least, as much as can be hoped for in any sort of reality show.

The number of contestant s narrows as the season goes on and the chefs face multiple types of cooking challenges. In the Invention test, each chef has less than one hour and a set of ingredients that must be used within the time gram to create a dish. The Pressure test puts the amateurs into real kitchens to see how they fare, as well as giving viewers an inside look at some great restaurants. And for the Final test, chefs are expected to put out their best 2 course meal for a review by the judges.

The show premiers on BBC America on October 2, but if you want to get in the mood to watch, blogger Maki of i was just really very hungry played along with the invention challenges when they aired in Europe earlier this year and tried to make 40-minute meals using the same ingredients that the MasterChef contestants were given to work with.

The networks must have tired of having reality show contestants battle for rewards of bagged Doritos and beer when stranded on deserted islands because they're taking the challenge of survival even further. The eight contestants on the weight loss show Man's First Diet (working title) will live with bushmen in the Kalahari desert and follow their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The men will hunt with the tribesmen while the women will "have to live according to the San Bushmen's strict social rules, looking on the ground for tubers and learning how to process and pound them to make them edible."

One of the goals of the show is to regain the knowledge of "the essential evolutionary link between food and effort." In other words, the contestants will hopefully realize that they should appreciate the food that they have at home, rather than inhaling packages of chips in front of the television. Whether the experiment, which will be monitored closely by experts evaluating their physical and mental health, will be a successful one remains to be seen, though it does seem likely that the participants will have difficulty transferring their new skills to life at home.

It is unknown how long the contestants will be out in Africa, but the show is planned to air over four 1-hour time slots on BBC3 in England.

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Top Chef has but two episodes left to go this season, if you count the "reunion show" next week along with the Las Vegas finale on May 17th. This week's episode was all about luxury and being able to showcase ingredients. It is unfortunate that Stephen was eliminated last week because he probably would have done very well in the elimination competition.

First up was the quickfire challenge, after the show took the viewers though a quick tour of the household dynamics to point out that no one really likes Tiffani very much. For the challenge, a table bearing plates of junk food - from corn dogs to ding dongs - was presented to the chefs. There was a moment where they all looked crestfallen, sick of having to cook with such unwelcome ingredients. Fortunately for the chefs, however, the task was to reinvent the junk food as a gourmet food and they had 45 minutes to do it.

This week the competition on Top Chef got even more intense as the  contestants faced one of their most difficult challenges yet. Not only did the chefs have to cook, but they had to come up with a concept and start a restaurant from scratch. The needed a name, decor, tableware and, most importantly, time, which they didn't have. As an unusual twist in this episode, the incentive of immunity was eliminated from the quickfire challenge and instead, a prize was offered to the winner. There was no guest judge, either. Chef Tom Colicchio stepped up to offer the challenge and the prize.

Tom is opening a branch of his restaurant, 'wichcraft, the fast food variation of his craft restaurant, in San Francisco and asked the chefs to prepare the perfect sandwich, a food that 'wichcraft specializes in. The winner would get his or her sandwich on the menu when the West Coast 'wichcraft opened. Fast, portable and delicious would win in the sandwich competition. All the chefs did well, but Miguel's Falafel sandwich was the flavor winner. Unfortunately, Miguel made his a "deconstructed" sandwich, which meant that it had to be eaten with a knife and fork. A sandwich without bread is not a sandwich, and instead of Miguel, Tom gave top billing to Harold's sandwich of mortadella with grapes, roasted peppers and sunchoke mayonnaise on sourdough. The recipes for Stephen and Dave's sandwiches, both of which looked delicious, are on the Bravo site.