The Barryfest Chronicles

Dear Toby,

Whenever a new season of Top Chef hits the airwaves, it moves right to the top of the list of my favorite TV shows.  Everything else on my DVR queue moves down the priority list, even though it happens to be one of the few shows I have ever made a conscious effort to watch during live on a regular basis since acquiring time-shifting capabilities.  The program is nothing short of a masterpiece.

My fascination with cooking shows began back when I about six or seven and spent many Saturday afternoons watching The Frugal Gourmet with my grandpa, and then it was only a matter of time before I was sucked in by the scourge of reality-competition that saturated the airwaves around the turn of the century.  So when Top Chef was plucked from the ether – a reality show that exploited both my love of epicurean television and the guilty pleasure I take in watching people endure real-time criticism before being given their walking papers – it took approximately one quarter of one episode for me to get hooked.

Now, my taste in television is suspect at best, so just getting me to tune in doesn’t exactly speak volumes for any particular show, but anyone who has watched even a single minute of Top Chef can tell it easily rises above the fray of mediocre reality-competition smut that saturates the airwaves, and I think that the substantive and insightful commentary from the judges is a big reason why.  In a stroke of genius, the producers of the show bucked the trend of including a prickly British douche bag on the panel and instead opted for well-spoken industry experts completely devoid of any axes to grind.  That is, of course, until you took over for Gail Simmons.

You have been nothing short of a complete shitbird in your short tenure on the show.  To be honest, I didn’t really expect much from a guy who made his name bragging about how many people he pissed off while failing as both a magazine editor and a screenwriter, but you still managed to catch me off guard.

Something was different this week, though.  For the first time since arriving on the panel – and very possibly for the first time in your life – you weren’t a total dickhead.  For some as yet unexplained reason, you decided to dial it back and actually act civil towards the talented chefs cooking their balls off in a break neck competition.  Hell, you even indulged the batshit “taste the love” nonsense Carla throws around every time judges table rolls around.

This is a far cry from the trite one-liners you have been delivering for the past few weeks; generic one-liners that, to be perfectly honest, only served to make you sound like a total nerd.  I am not saying everyone should pull a Ben Lyons and lavish hyperbolic praise on all the I Am Legends of the world, but reciting condescending canned soundbites doesn’t offer any real insight into either your alleged intelligence or what, exactly, you found unacceptable about any particular offending dish.

Until recently, the only thing you added to Top Chef was a weird tension every time Tom and Padma were put in the precarious position of getting the conversation back on track after you talked out of your ass.  Now you seem to contributing something relevant to the discourse, which is probably a lot harder work than piling on with a biting metaphor that is neither creative nor funny, but I have to think it is also at least marginally more satisfying, right?

If there is one thing I have learned during my four plus years of maintaining a blog on an on-again, off-again basis, it is that topical, nondescript potshots are the currency of a bankrupt critic.  That was pretty much all you could find in the first edition of The Barryfest Chronicles, a site a I started around my junior year in college that did little more than answer the age-old question of “What would a drug-addled college student with nothing to really complain about complain about if given a forum to do so?”, so I know who satisfying they are to deliver but also how stupid they ultimately make you sound.

Anyone can hop on the pot and take a dump, but it takes skill and expertise to offer criticism while not simultaneously coming off as a piece of shit.

Top Chef is my favorite show on television and I just ask that you take what happened this week and build on it.  If I wanted to hear a snooty douchbag make himself look stupid by being a complete asshole to masters of the culinary arts, I wouldn’t turn off Iron Chef America everytime Jeffrey Steingarten grabs the mic.

Dear Kanye,

I spent Saturday night at my first holiday party of the season, so I unfortunately was not able to watch the original airing of the most recent Saturday Night Live, in which you were featured as the evening’s musical guest.  No worry, though, as I have been DVRing that shit since I first equipped my audio/visual set up with DVR technology almost two and a half years ago in my apartment back in Minneapolis.

I’ve always been a huge SNL apologist, keeping faith in the show even through the doldrums of the turn of the century with all it’s Jimmy Fallon-tainted misery.  Even then, when the majority of each broadcast featured Horatio Sanz in a variety of ill-fitting get-ups trying in vain not to break character and laugh while delivering terribly written lines, I found it amusing enough to keep watching whenever the mood struck and my schedule cooperated. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s gonna take that heart to sail that boat” – Robin

I have been following The Real World franchise since it’s grainy, poorly lit inception over 16 years ago.  And while I have been pretty adamant about the recent decline of civilization in the last few Real World houses, I realized last night that I have been overlooking a very important fact that has undoubtedly bended my perception over the years.  I’ve grown up.

See, I still consider The Real World: Seattle the undisputed high water mark of MTV programming.  My memories of the show are filled with authentic interactions between dynamic people in real-life circumstances.  There is no doubt that these memories may be entirely accurate.  An equally likely scenario, though, is that at the time the series aired I was a 14 year dork who didn’t even know what “authentic interactions,” “dynamic people,” and “real-life circumstances” actually were. Read the rest of this entry »

It is no secret that I have a pretty expansive taste when it comes to television shows.  It’s not like I exclusively watch unusual documentary programming or mediocre sitcoms, it’s just that with the advent of DVR and Cox cable’s surprisingly large selection of specialty HD channels, I consume huge amounts of TV on a weekly basis.  I say the line-up here in New Orleans is “surprisingly” large because it is a surprise when any utility, public good or service down here functions as it should.  This is the type of place where three consecutive days of mail service is cause for celebration, so while we may not actually get more HD channels than any typical metro area, it sure feels that way considering we have to pay to recycle and landline phone service has been know to go out for a few hours at a time on a sunny day.

Anyways. The point I am trying to make it is that I watch almost all of the typical TV shows that most people watch, but even after making time for those and surfing around MLB Extra Innings each evening, I somehow still have plenty of room on my schedule to watch a bunch of weird shit.

One of the shows that has caught my attention over the past few years is the docu-fuckscene that is Intervention on A&E (and now A&E HD!).  For a long time, I was pretty sure that:

1. I was the only one who watched it
2. At least half of that shit was completely scripted. Read the rest of this entry »

During the doldrums of summer, I found myself at home one weekday evening with nothing to do.  The Red Sox were not playing, I promised Glizz that I would not start Season 2 of The Wire until he returned from his law school sponsored vacation in Greece (a promise that I at least kept for the first 4 weeks of his 6 week excursion), and I had yet to buy the Grateful Dead Six pack for Rock Band.

Flipping around on the tube, I stumbled across the TBS original sitcom My Boys.  I figured I would give it a go.  All I knew going into my first viewing was that it is set in Chicago and filmed in HD.  Hitting one of these criteria is good enough for me to give something the old college try, so the fact that it got both was promising.  Besides, it prominently features Jim Gaffigan, so it can’t be that bad, right?

Right.  It’s really not that bad.  Under different circumstance, it may not have earned the “Record entire season” distinction on my DVR, but for some reason I was feeling charitable after my first viewing and gave it the go.  After watching one cleverly written, comfortably paced episode after another it dawned on me:  Sure, this show is not going to be the next Seinfeld or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (hell, I don’t even think it will be the next The Single Guy or Boston Common), but does that automatically qualify it as unwatchable?  An alleged film major, for example, may say “Yes, that does make it unwatchable.”  He may also say “Christ, man!  I figured you were recording it to be ironic!” Read the rest of this entry »