Cooking with Schadenfreude: Hell's Kitchen is Back!

This last television season I kind of dropped out of the rat race. I lost interest in Survivor, I gave up on Gilmore Girls, I failed to latch on to any new shows, and I just got bored and ended up downloading shows of yesteryear (seven seasons of Buffy in 6 weeks, anyone?). If you can't get excited about the fall lineup, you've pretty much lost interest in television, right?

No.

Hell's Kitchen is back, party people.

I'm not much of a cook. I am a mediocre cook, at best. I don't particularly enjoy cooking, and I don't watch cooking shows or read cooking magazines. If you write recipe articles, I've probably never read them. So why do I watch Hell's Kitchen? Why do any of us watch reality television?

Schadenfreude. Pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. In this case: laughing at those poor bastards driven to tears by the magnificently evil Chef Gordon Ramsay. The previews thus far have promised buckets of tears and at least as much edited cursing as the previous two seasons. Chef Ramsay %$! curses so much that half of the %$! dialogue is lost in %$! bleeps. It's a %$! beautiful thing.

The premise of the show, at its core, is not so different from other reality shows: Twelve wannabe chefs come to "Hell's Kitchen" to compete for a position as head chef of one of Ramsay's award-winning kitchens. Actually, they get to be head chef of a brand new restaurant. The poor schlubs that apply for a chance to participate come from all walks of life: some are retired stockbrokers who decided that since they're so awesome at everything that they would make an awesome chef, too; some worked in a prison cafeteria; some were salad chefs, for the love of frickin' god. All of them think that they have a shot to be a head chef at a five star restaurant. Every week one of them gets tossed off the show. Contestants start with the backstabbing and bitchery.

Hilarity ensues.

See, Chef Ramsay is no Jeff Whatsisface from Survivor. He's not even a catty America's Next Top Model judge. No, Chef Ramsay is in his own class. He's a fire-breathing asshole who picks on the fat guys and makes the girls cry. He will tell contestants that they are %$! losers. He's sexist. He's offensive. He rarely praises and he constantly insults. This is good television, friends.

Listen. You may think that Hell's Kitchen and Chef Gordon Ramsay sounds like a really crappy place to be and a real a-hole, respectively. You would not be wrong. But dig a little deeper inside yourself and find that part of you that enjoys seeing someone who has it worse than you-- nay, someone who willingly signed up to have it worse than you, and to have that hell televised-- and turn on Hell's Kitchen next Monday. You're only behind one episode, and no less than five grown adults cried on the first episode-- and Chef Ramsay was actually being fairly nice.

It looks to be a promising season. Just try it. You know you want a big steaming bowl of schadenfreude.