So based on David Bianculli's review, I watched the first couple of episodes of NBC new show Next Great Restaurant, and it took only those two episodes to help me re-realize why I am refuse to watch almost all network reality TV. I don't know if it is their budgets, their casting, or their audience, but cable televisions reality programming (minus MTV) has just that dusting of panache necessary to keep me from feeling manipulated. Or, their manipulation is just subtle enough that I am kosher with it. At least on Bravo and whatever network Project Runway is now on, they just show you that they are using Glad Press-n-Seal, I don't have to hear the facetious opinions about how great the stuff really is. Next Great Restaurant really is great if you can bear through its bluntness to see the deep, ontological problems it presents about our country.
The show has yuppies and whitepeople of various flavors (some ironically making fun of Southerners, because hey, why not poke fun at the people in our country with all the guns fighting our wars for us who can actually fix and make things. Others talking about how it is their dream to open a healthy, portion-controlled restaurant, and they didn't really want to be a lawyer after going to Harvard Law School, after finishing up in the Peace Corps. One of the putzy yuppies' dream is to open a grilled cheese fast food chain; it's no Kierkegaardean defining commitment, but who am I to question to ontology of someone that wants to melt cheese on bread for a living) pitching their 'concept' about their chain of fast food restaurants. One would think that say, food, would be their concept, but apparently that isn't teleological enough for most of America, so they have to have an idea being the idea. Needless to say, I never knew our country was so Platonic, but hope springs eternal as the saying goes.
The basic premise, which is a mash-up of various other reality tv shows (BBC's The Resturant and Dragon's Den in particular), is ten 'people' have to compete to open the proverbial next great resturant. Their 'prize' is a small, three resturant franchise in three prominent American cities (New York, LA, and, of course, Minneapolis) with financial backing coming from 4 investors who also serve as the judges of the show and its producers, which means they are making money hand over fist, with ample references to their own restaurants (try to go 5 minutes of watching the show without hearing how Steve Ellis owns Chipotle. In fact, next weeks 'challenge' takes place in a Chipotle, because how else to learn about creating a resturant than working as an order-taker at a fast food place). The show amplifies the speed of things by advertising that by the end of it, if it actually makes it through sweeps, you will be able to go into one of these restaurants, and reinforces this by showing you how long until the winning restaurants open. From a cultural criticism perspective, there is almost too much in it to talk about, but, needless to say, everyone has a sob story or some sort, because success can only come to those who've lost of a mother, or job, or dog or whatever. The irony of crying and shvitzing about how your mother died when you were 16 against the backdrop of Japan become the new Chernobyl and Pakistan having devastating flooding all last wet season is a little hard to take, but never underestimate people and television to make mountains out of molehills, and to universalize the most personal, and really, small troubles. We aren't talking about living Job's confronting God in the form of the whirlwind, but that doesn't seem to stop them from engaging in malignantly narcissistic behavior. A particular highlight from the episodes so far is their selection of an Indian man who wants to start a chain of southern Indian restaurants, but did not give him access to any Indian chefs, so he had to have a Swede cook for him, Apparently finding an Indian chef was simply outside the resources of NBC Universal. Half the people can't cook and don't know anything about cooking, and see the creation of a franchise as just another type of techne.
The show really gets at the sped up pace of modern life, and the lack of connection with place or past. With all the talk of concepts and logos and the techne of running a resturant, there is almost nothing about being with the world and within the world. To the show, its contestants, and its judges, New York is LA is Minneapolis is Shanghai, as long as the logo is good enough. It is odd to desire a lack of place, but this is, I suppose the modern condition. Or, put another way, the modern way of being is to either not have a way of being, or to have a way of being so flexible that you can be anything. Machiavelli had the great insight that man is infinitely more malleable than the ancients ever thought. For Plato and Aristotle, there was a Natural Right and it dictated certain ends. Machiavelli, having seen Christianity ravage the West for hundreds of years, coming out of a hierarchical, stratified Catholic culture, saw that you really could make man into anything you wanted, that, as Pascal would say a century later, custom is man's nature. Lots of ink has been spilled about how unreal reality tv is, but I don't think those that see it this way are sensitive to the ontological shift that has taken place in the past decade. This is what I suppose the post-modern hyper-realists like Baudrillard talked about, but it isn't the reality of something that never really was, it is the amping up of something actually there, hyper-reality in the sense of being more real than reality. So if you are a putz, reducing hours and hours of tape down to 4 minutes of screen time doesn't simulate putzness, or put putzness upon your being, it purifies your putzness. The casual view, most viewers, correctly do not draw any distinction between reality and reality tv because one does not exist.
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