This occurred to us when we were watching "Last Restaurant Standing" (don't ask why) on BBC America. On this show, teams of couples compete for the right to open a restaurant with (apparently) world-famous French chef, the all-but-unintelligible Raymond Blanc. Each couple opens a restaurant where one member of the team serves as head chef and the other as front-of-house. Blanc presents the teams with weekly challenges, and one by one the teams are eliminated until only one restaurant is "left standing."
Now, bear in mind that the grand prize is, not to put to fine a point on it, a job. The winners don't get a large cash prize; they get a contract. They get to do presumably that which they have been doing already: run a restaurant. So we started wondering as we watched this show: How did people open restaurants--even in partnership with world-famous chefs--before "Last Restaurant Standing"?
Presumably they had to resort to such barbaric methods as developing business plans, sending in job applications, writing resumes, etc. And of course people still do these things. After all, not all up-and-coming fashion designers go on "Project Runway"; businessmen not named Trump find apprentices at the Wharton School, not NBC; and while Gordon Ramsay is now the primary headhunter for Atlantic City casino restaurants, one imagines that Le Bernardin and Per Se and The French Laundry still find their head chefs the old-fashioned way--through aggressive recruitment of the most talented personnel.
In contrast, one notices that the contestants who go on these shows are generally good at what they do, but not great. They are interesting personalities who "make good television," but who may not be able to make a good evening gown or business plan or Bernaise sauce.
Consider "Hell's Kitchen." In Season One, the grand prize was a job as head chef in one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants. Immediately after announcing "Michael" as the winner, though, Ramsay offered to take him back to London in order to train him further. In other words, Ramsay felt he was good enough to win but not good enough for the job. More interestingly, Michael took Ramsay up on the offer.
It's interesting that some of the most popular programming in America revolves around people applying for jobs for which they are not the most qualified candidates. Perhaps audiences take comfort in the fact that they themselves have jobs and do them well. And while they may envy people their fifteen minutes of reality-show fame, they take no small satisfaction in the thought that they, at least, didn't have to put themselves through televised humiliation just to earn the right to bring home a paycheck.
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