Follow Up – MasterChef Australia

MasterChef Australia – Ten – 7:30pm Weeknights – AUS

The behemoth that is MasterChef Australia is back and you better be ready for it because it’s on six nights a week. The whole thing kicked off last night with a 90 minute first episode where we were introduced to 50 new contestants and got to watch as they floundered about trying to impress the judges. While host Sarah Wilson from last season has been given the boot, all three of the boys are back in town: Gary, George who is again. Treating. Every. Word. Like. A. Sentence! And of course Matt Preston who’s amazingly become more of a pompous oaf since last time we saw him.

As the music swells we’re treated to an overblown introduction that makes it seem like we’re looking for King Arthur himself and not somebody with a winning personality and some culinary skills. The soundtrack rises and falls like we’re in some epic BBC mini-series. It takes an ad break or two but the bluster starts to calm down a touch and we get to see what we love: people cooking food in a hurry. The first task of the night was to cook something on a BBQ or as Gary put it “You have 90 minutes to prepare a dish on the BBQ that is going to blow us away.” Which made it sound like after they finished cooking the BBQ would explode in their face.

The pressure is on because the bottom ten contestants will have to face off in a challenge set by attention seeker and part time recipe book superstar Donna Hay. As the BBQ challenge got underway we caught brief glimpses of the contestants but already we could see that the most underrated person in reality TV is the casting director. Last year brought a fantastic batch of personalities and again we get people like Jake, the tradie, who cut two of his fingers in the process of getting his steak together. He’s a great find; while somebody like Joanne is good only because you always need somebody to hate and I can’t tell you how much I already HATE Joanne. I didn’t see a lot of Katie, but she’s running a close second to Joanne and her tiny tiny mouth.

Once again the thing that MasterChef does better than any other cooking show on TV is make every dish look fantastic. It helps that the sets are epic, and the production values are top notch, but when even the crappy dishes come off looking like something you’d want to devour it puts MasterChef in a class above the pretenders. I’m not sure whether it’s the food presentation or the lack of snark from the contestants and the judges but there’s something about MasterChef that just feels classier than My Kitchen Rules which often felt gritty and underdone to me.

As the results from the first challenge came in and we found out who our bottom ten would have to prepare a pavlova, the worst five pavs would be sent home. Before they had even started the task I made a bold prediction. I told my girlfriend I’d give her $50 if Sharnee went home. There was something about the teary eyed, otherwise bubbly girl that just screamed ‘TV’ to me and I knew the producers could see it too because in the first hour alone she’d managed to score a whole bunch of screen time. Sharnee would have to have plated up absolute vomit to be sent home at this point. The judges can talk up how much this is about finding the next great Australian chef but this is a TV show and if you make good TV you get to stay.

The reason that Julie won last year was because it made for a better story. She’s the stay at home mum who showed Australia that anybody could come out and have a go. It’s a simple formula that applies to any show where the judges get the final say on who’s sent home. When you’ve got a line up of ten contestants and five of them have to go home ask yourself ‘who makes better TV?’ Adele with her shaky hands and her nerves make great TV. Jason and his sweaty forehead don’t.

Even though MasterChef falls into all of those reality TV traps like padding out the show with hyperbole from the judges and all those cliffhangers right before the ad breaks, it somehow is able to rise above all that and give us some damn fine TV. While we may be sick of hearing how every reality contestant on every reality show is ‘doing it for their family’ we’re definitely not sick of the drama that comes when a pavlova collapses with minutes left on the clock. There’s no other show on TV that can pull moments like that off. MasterChef still manages to somehow transform itself from a compelling cooking show into must-see TV.