My Music Reality Show Idea

Tuned! Or Scored or F-Majored or whatever.

I have grown weary of television over the last few years. I’ve grown to despise the predictable, trite, formulaic crap the networks churn out. And I think I’ve never really been able to forgive television people for cancelling Firefly, so there’s a lot of television-directed anger swimming around in my amygdala. But, oddly, I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows lately. Like, a LOT of cooking shows. Hell’s Kitchen, Top Chef, Chefs vs. City, The Best Thing I Ever Ate, Kitchen Nightmares, Top Chef: Masters… All these shows fascinate me. But the one I’ve been watching most of lately is called Chopped.

If you’re unfamiliar with this show, the premise is this: they get four chefs every week (something I’ve been wondering lately: what is the difference between an executive chef and a Master Chef? I can only imagine that they hold a secret tournament every year where executive chefs fight to the death with lime zesters and halibut de-scalers, and the one left standing is elevated to Master Chef status. Mario Batali must be a BADASS with a zester). They give them baskets containing odd ingredients, and they have to make food including those ingredients. For example, one round they might open their baskets to reveal polenta, starfruit, crab eyeballs, and the rare man-eating blood-saffron, and each one is given thirty minutes to incorporate those items into something delicious. There are three rounds–appetizer, entree, and dessert–and one chef is eliminated (“chopped,” if you hadn’t already guessed) after each round, leaving one victor with ten thousand dollars and all his or her limbs intact.

So I was watching this show, and I started thinking how great it would be to adapt it into a musical contest. I mean, let’s be as brutally metaphorical as possible: music-based reality shows are the oozing pus leaking out of the weeping sore infecting the malignant tumor of the wrinkled rectum of the television medium. There’s more to music than emotionally unstable attention whores singing pentatonic melismas to karaoke arrangements of “I Will Survive,” right?

RIGHT? (more…)

Sep 15, 2009 | Categories: Music, You Can't Spell 'Acerbic' Without Eric Column | Tags: Arlo, Bravo, Chopped, Eric Summer, Hell's Kitchen, LA Weekly, Mac Dunlop, Mike Schnee, Pu$$ycow, Sean Spillane, The Letter Openers, Top Chef, Top Chef Masters, Underwater City People, Viola, Wormstew, You Can't Spell Acerbic Without Eric | 4 Comments »