Warning: numerous plot-spoilers ahead!
Over the years, Bronwyn and I have worked out the parameters for our own personal taste in Reality TV.
We're not particularly interested in people in bikinis and speedos arranging trysts on far-off tropical islands. Nor do we like eye-on-the-wall programmes about people having spiteful arguments in cramped apartments. Nor vote-them-off-the-island Survivor-type gamesmanship shows.
Not that we're throwing shade on anyone who does, mind you. Quot homines tot sententiæ, as the Latin dramatist Terence once put it: "So many people, so many opinions". Or, as Clint Eastwood paraphrased it in The Dead Pool: "Opinions are like assholes. Everbody's got one."
So where does that leave us? What we do seem to like consistently are programmes where a group of people compete in terms of some particular skill they all share.
As a result, we've watched competitions between fashion designers (Project Runway / Next in Fashion), glass artists (Blown Away), interior designer experts (Interior Design Masters / The Big Interiors Battle), make-up artists [MUAs] (Face Off / Glow Up: Britain's Next Make-Up Star), metalworkers (Forged in Fire / Metal Shop Masters), potters (The Great Pottery Throw Down), home sewers (The Great British Sewing Bee), woodworkers (Good with Wood: Britain's Best Woodworker) - even Drag fashion designers (Sew Fierce!)
It sounds like quite a lot, when you list them like that. Every single one of them started off strange, then quickly became compelling. The intensity and sheer talent of the competitors was inspiring and (to be honest) a little intimidating at times.
What I haven't yet mentioned are the innumerable cooking programmes we've watched - some featuring trained chefs, others inspired amateurs - most of them designed to crown some "Top Chef" or "Master Chef" or "Best Baker" at the end of a series of gruelling contests.
At one time or another, we've probably tried them all. We don't have much patience left for the quasi-ubiquitous Gordon Ramsay, and neither of us ever really took to My Kitchen Rules, but we're always ready to give a newcomer a go. Recently that's included the intense Korean cooking competition Culinary Class Wars, as well as the new American show, Pressure Cooker, which - according to Wikipedia:
has been described as a mix of Top Chef and Big Brother - combining the cooking challenges of the former, and the social politicking of the latter.
By contrast, for all its Squid Game-style trappings, and its attempts to whip up class resentment along the lines of Oscar-winning Korean movie Parasite, Culinary Class Wars was really just a standard competitive cooking show like any other: the whims of the judges were what counted most.
In this case the two judges - veteran restaurateur Paik Jong-won, and Michelin three-star chef Anh Sung-jae - were presumably chosen for their respective penchants for traditional Korean cookery and international fine-dining.
As it turned out, they didn't always vote according to formula - nor did they really clearly embody the Old Guard / Young Turk divide which the show was designed to highlight. But when Anh Sung-jae announced that he would never give any dish - even one of his own - much more than 90 out of 100 ("since there's always room for improvement"), while Paik Jong-won regularly awarded much higher grades, the fairness of this system did seem a little open to question.
In essence, to quote a Stephen King-ism, SSDD [Same Shit, Different Day]. The focus throughout was too much on the judges, and the preprogrammed nature of the eventual decision led us to suspect that the producers had pretty much decided in advance that a young Black Shirt had to win over an old White Shirt, and a "genuine" Korean had to defeat the multicultural outsider Edward Lee.
The unpleasant arrogance of the young victor "Napoli Matfia" [? misspelling of Mafia?], whose predilection for pasta and other Italian dishes throughout made one question whether he could possibly have won fair and square if he, too, had been forced to undergo the interminable penultimate tofu challenge, left a somewhat bitter taste in the mouth.
What's more, Edward Lee's imperturbable courtesy, combined with his virtuosity and encyclopedic knowledge of the culinary arts, made him seem a more appropriate judge than competitor in such an exhausting ordeal.
The fact that Lee has gone from strength to strength since, whereas the actual "winner", Kwon Sung-jun, has been forced to eat humble pie and apologise profusely on social media for his churlish remarks and attitude throughout the series, combined to create a less than satisfactory experience.
To me, the whole thing illustrated the twin pitfalls of the TV cooking competition:
- the vogue of the celebrity judge:
As the number of series mounts up, contestants have come and gone in their droves; as a result, the presenters and judges have a tendency to become the real stars. Padma Lakshmi and her right-hand man Chef Tom Colicchio in Top Chef, Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith in The Great British Bake Off, and the various generations of Australian Masterchef judges all have their own catchphrases and mannerisms. At least the American shows have eschewed the tiresome British formula of having one or two clapped-out comedians to front each show, alongside some more sober-sided experts, but they too have their increasingly cast-iron tics and conventions.
- ubiquitous (and often inappropriate) product placement:
Top Chef is a particular offender in this regard. Challenges sponsored by some particular junk-food manufacturer have become increasingly common, and increasingly obtrusive. Sponsorship should not come with tacit endorsement of such products in defiance of all the laws of good nutrition ...
So here they all are - all 11 contestants - in order of dismissal (you can see why I warned you about spoilers at the head of this post!)
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Pressure Cooker Contestants
in order of departure
Liv was sent home for serving undercooked chicken during the first challenge.
This was the first piece of game-playing. The contestants had to choose between Christan and Brian, and the latter persuaded them that although he might be a weaker cook, he'd be a more grateful ally down the road.
In the breakfast cook-off between Brian and Ed, more people voted to keep the latter than the former.
More gamesmanship. The devious Jeana persuaded the others that Lana was more of a threat to them than she was, given the latter's greater skill as a chef.
Ed didn't stay for the customary goodbyes, but simply walked out on hearing that his dish had been judged last.
It had to happen. Jeana's intriguing finally caught up with her, and the vote to expel her was unanimous.
Caroline made a tiny error in her dish, and that was enough to condemn her, given the very high standard of all the food by this stage in the competition.
There was a bizarre twist towards the end when Mike's winning dish earned him the right to decide which of the other three would face him in the final. He chose Robbie, possibly because he considered him a weaker opponent than either Renee or Sergei.
Sergei was rather lost in any case without his "work wife" Caroline (her phrase). The others had taken to referring to the duo as "Sergoline," and saw their apparently unbreakable alliance as a looming threat.
Mike assumed that his fine dining skills would bring him victory, but unfortunately for him, other factors - such as day-to-day behaviour in the house - came into the final decision as well.
And so Robbie, the underdog, carried off a popular and well-deserved victory. Despite his great talents, he probably wasn't the stronger chef, but he seemed to a majority of the others to be a more worthy human being.
William Poundstone. Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
I certainly don't claim to be any authority on Game Theory, though I have dutifully worked my way through the book pictured above. Much of it was, alas, over my head. In particular, understanding the complexities of the "Prisoner's Dilemma" concept requires a grasp of mathematics which I simply don't have.
What I do understand about it seems, however - to me, at least - directly relevant to this competition. It's for this reason that I included so much detailed information about the fortunes of each contestant under the list of cast photographs above.
But what exactly is this "Prisoner's Dilemma"? This is how William Poundstone explains it:
Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge.So the dilemma is simply this: should they both clam up, or should they testify against each other? But wait, there's more:
Oh, yes, there is a catch ... If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to two years in jail. The prisoners are given a little time to think this over, but in no case may either learn what the other has decided until he has irrevocably made his decision. Each is informed that the other prisoner is being offered the very same deal. Each prisoner is concerned only with his own welfare — with minimizing his own prison sentence.So, in other words, there are four different possible outcomes for prisoners A and B:
- If A and B both remain silent, they will each serve one year in prison.
- If A testifies against B but B remains silent, A will be set free while B serves three years in prison.
- If A remains silent but B testifies against A, A will serve three years in prison and B will be set free.
- If A and B testify against each other, they will each serve two years.
Here's a little diagram to illustrate these various scenarios:
So if I'm A and you're B, what's my best line of action? If I think that you're likely to stay silent, then it would be best for me to turn you in. If, however, I think you're likely to talk, then it would be best for me to talk too, rather than staying silent and getting three years instead of two.
Is it best to be selfish, or to show solidarity with my fellow prisoner?
The Wikipedia article on the subject sums it up as follows:
Regardless of what the other decides, each prisoner gets a higher reward by betraying the other ("defecting"). The reasoning involves analyzing both players' best responses: B will either cooperate or defect. If B cooperates, A should defect, because going free is better than serving 1 year. If B defects, A should also defect, because serving 2 years is better than serving 3. So, either way, A should defect since defecting is A's best response regardless of B's strategy. Parallel reasoning will show that B should defect.So far, so easy. That's pretty much Adam Smith's prescription of enlightened self-interest and the invisible hand of the market. But life isn't always as simple as that. There are also variants on the game:
Defection always results in a better payoff than cooperation, so it is a strictly dominant strategy for both players.
If two players play the prisoner's dilemma more than once in succession, remember their opponent's previous actions, and are allowed to change their strategy accordingly, the game is called the iterated prisoner's dilemma.This "iterated prisoner's dilemma" is also called the "peace-war game":
The iterated prisoner's dilemma is fundamental to some theories of human cooperation and trust. Assuming that the game effectively models transactions between two people that require trust, cooperative behavior in populations can be modeled by a multi-player iterated version of the game.The value of cooperation cannot be taken for granted, however:
If the iterated prisoner's dilemma is played a finite number of times and both players know this, then the dominant strategy ... is to defect in all rounds. The proof is inductive: one might as well defect on the last turn, since the opponent will not have a chance to later retaliate. Therefore, both will defect on the last turn. Thus, the player might as well defect on the second-to-last turn, since the opponent will defect on the last no matter what is done, and so on. The same applies if the game length is unknown but has a known upper limit.
For cooperation to emerge between rational players, the number of rounds must be unknown or infinite. In that case, "always defect" may no longer be a dominant strategy. ... rational players repeatedly interacting for indefinitely long games can sustain cooperation. Specifically, a player may be less willing to cooperate if their counterpart did not cooperate many times, which causes disappointment. Conversely, as time elapses, the likelihood of cooperation tends to rise, owing to the establishment of a "tacit agreement" among participating players. In experimental situations, cooperation can occur even when both participants know how many iterations will be played. [my emphases]
The analogies with the game-show Pressure Cooker are, of course, far from exact. For a start, there are 11 players, not 2, and the competition rules change unpredictably with each challenge.
From my own observations - particularly of the straight-to-camera footage of each contestant - virtually all of them came into this situation determined to look after number one, and to follow the strategy most likely to earn them victory.
And yet, by the end of the programme, even the most arrogant and driven of the various competitors - Mike - was at least paying lip service to the amount he'd "learned" from the other chefs, and the ways in which he'd grown as a person as a result.
In fact, the only one of them who had much to fear when this footage was screened to the world - and her fellow contestants - was Jeana. She'd told a number of lies in the course of the episodes, and was suspected of duplicity by most of the others as a result. She justified all this as simply "playing the game," but the fact that none of her dishes ever came top at any point made it seem as if she saw this as her only chance of winning.
Everyone else formed alliances and friendships, but during the "blind tastings" of each other's food, there was not a single occasion when any of them applied any criterion except simple merit - although some of them discussed the idea of trying to detect and vote down the work of more powerful players, they didn't actually do it.
The strong abilities of almost all of the chefs - even Jeana, whose mastery of Mexican cuisine became apparent as the contest went on - made it clear that they were learning from each other as they got more familiar with one another, and that in many ways this was supplanting the increasingly distant prospect of that single cash prize.
In the end, Robbie's final meal was described by him as an hommage to the other chefs, with explicit references to particular dishes they'd cooked coded into each course. This "heart on his sleeve" approach - compassionate towards the others, but also honest about his own feelings - appears to be what won him the competition.
His younger opponent Mike, almost certainly his superior in technique and inventiveness, lost by a margin of one vote, mainly because - as a few of them remarked - he was guaranteed great success in his career in the long run, in any case.
Even though the participants did know how many iterations of the basic game would be played, the elements of uncertainty in each round seem to have made cooperation and mutual respect not only a viable but a winning strategy. The most orthodox gameplayer, Jeana, was eliminated because the others all had memories of her previous action. They could compare what she was saying now with what she'd done previously.
And, in the eyes of the larger community outside the game, almost all of the contestants - besides Jeana - had shown themselves skilful and cooperative in all sorts of cooking situations. Who would hesitate to work with any one of them? Jeana, however, had failed the job interview. Her longterm prospects of opening a restaurant with her long-estranged father seem dubious. All this despite the fact that her skill at blending flavours, and in Mexican cooking in particular, were strongly in evidence on screen.
To quote one Reddit commentator's blunt assessment:
She was so grimy for what she did to christian and lana. So many alligator tears and fake encounters, she was my least favorite 1000%Jeana, I wish you well, but I doubt that you have much prospect of remaining friends with any of the other cast members. I just hope your strict adherence to self-advantage, the optimum strategy within a single-iteration version of Prisoner's Dilemma, doesn't cost you too dearly in the other parts of your life.
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