Chopped!

Food Network is my favorite network. Yes, even more so than ESPN, which all too often tears at the soul with mind numbing programming (I might have mentioned that before).

There's a new show premiering this week on FN, Chopped, which looks to be a mix of Iron Chef and Food Network Challenge. According to the commercial, four random chefs are brought in, given a secret ingredient, and told to whip up a dish. These creations are judged, low score is booted, rinse and repeat until we have one chef left standing. Ted Allen will apparently be the host, a decent choice given that Alton Brown is probably otherwise engaged. You need a someone known FN personality to MC a show like this. Allen knows his stuff and has a more sophisticated and appropriate presence than someone like Mark Summers.

There's no doubt that I'll be tuning in and giving this show a chance to win me over. What I really wonder about, however, is how the formatting and editing will work. The show is at 10 PM. My best guess is that its an hour long. No way could you pack three 30 minute cooking rounds into a mere half hour, and a 2 hour show is too long to syndicate and really gain a following.

Yet even with an hour you have only 45 minutes or so of programming after commercials. In that time they'll have to introduce the chefs, reveal the ingredient, and have 3 rounds of cooking and judging. At first glance, this doesn't seem like such a problem. On Iron chef they squeeze the reveal, 60 minutes of cooking, and the judging into a mere 44 minutes. Similarly, the FN challenges condense up to 6 hours of prep time into an hour. However, on those shows the cooking is in one contained block and therefore easier to break up into just highlights. You can have several blocks separated by commercials dedicated just to the cooking, with intro and judging as bookends.

In this case, however, you have judging injected between the cooking rounds. The only way I can see making this work is to cut out a ton of the actual cooking. If you do so, however, I fear you'll lose some of the appeal of having a cooking show in the first place.

Whether this effects the show at all remains to be seen. I imagine that FN has audience tested this thing, so hopefully my fears will be unfounded and we'll have another good show to enjoy.