NBC Photo: Virginia Sherwood
I never got around to reviewing last night’s debut of NBC’s The Chopping Block, the cooking competition hosted by bad-boy-chef (a burgeoning category, and somehow it’s always a boy) Marco Pierre White. I did watch it, though, and I decided that if it couldn’t remotely hold my interest—I was a food-TV junkie long before I watched TV for a living, and would watch much more if not forced by my job to watch Stuff That Normal People Watch—then it probably wasn’t worth comment. I think the bottom line is that I simply have no interest in cooking competitions, like Hell’s Kitchen, in which the celebrity host is more the star of the show than the contestants. Obviously NBC could care less what I think, since creating their own Gordon Ramsay seems to be reasons #1, 2 and 3 for putting this show on the air. Did it turn on your burners?