'Top Chef: Wisconsin' Screwed Over Its Winner
By
Dustin Rowles
The thing about Top Chef and other cooking competitions is that while we watch the chefs prepare and present their dishes, as viewers, we miss out on actually tasting them. We rely solely on judges’ critiques to gauge the quality. I’d welcome the opportunity to sample the results of a quickfire challenge, where chefs concoct dishes in just 20 minutes using random pantry items and a surprise protein. How does such a dish stack up against a carefully prepared home-cooked meal? Or is it judged solely in comparison to its quickfire competition?
I’ve always struggled to truly understand the flavors in shows like Top Chef or GBBO. When a dish is undercooked — a glaring flaw in my book — the judges sometimes dismiss a potential salmonella outbreak as a minor issue. It’s baffling. Indeed, it’s somewhat miraculous that a show like Top Chef works at all, given its premise is based on tasting food — a sensory experience the audience can’t participate in. Instead, the show thrives on aesthetics, the chefs’ personalities, and crucially, the power of editing.
Take the Top Chef finale. My wife and I, like many others, were home judges rooting for Savannah, yet it seemed Dan, the underdog, would clinch the title from Danny, the standout chef for much of the season. Our only insights were the judges’ critiques, which were notably harsher on Danny than on Dan, who only received minor feedback on one dish’s texture.
When Danny was declared the winner, concerns immediately arose that his victory was less about merit and more about his unique background as the first Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Muslim winner, nevermind that audiences might have also complained if Dan had won that it was because the judges gave preference to the underdog chef battling Kennedy’s disease, a rare neuromuscular condition.
It had nothing to do with the background of either. The real controversy stemmed not from the cooking but from the editing, which Gail discussed on The Ringer podcast, via on Reality Blurred:
There is a lot of editing. And there needs to be because we have so many hours of television. We have eight cameras over the course of three full days for that one episode. […] We don’t want to make it obvious, and our post-production team does a really good job of this because it would be really boring if it was the other way, right? If it was obvious that it was Danny the whole time. Dan cooked some amazing stuff, and he did cook consistently. But they cut out a lot of our criticisms of Dan because they don’t want to make it obvious. And I think what they do sometimes is bump up our criticism of the winner because they don’t want to make it obvious.
What ends up happening is it sort of swings the other way, so the audience is going with that edit, and they only have us to trust as their taste buds. And what comes out sometimes is that it feels like the other person should have won.
Tom called me at 10 o’clock this morning with that same comment: Maybe they over-edited it. They swung it too far in the other direction in an effort to throw everyone off the scent.
This manipulation for drama’s sake is understandable, even expected on a reality TV show like Survivor, where producers omit key conversations to preserve suspense. But it feels misplaced in a merit-based finale like Top Chef’s. There, the editing skewed so heavily in favor of Dan that any suspense was replaced by disbelief at the perceived unfairness. Manipulating for drama is one thing; outright dishonesty is another. This kind of misleading edit distorts the competition’s integrity and feeds into harmful stereotypes about unfair advantages, making it not just misleading but potentially harmful.
Had it been “obvious” that Danny was destined to win, it should have been as clear-cut to the viewers as it was that Savannah had decisively come in third. There’s a difference between crafting suspense, like on Survivor, and falsely suggesting non-existent support for a contestant, which does a significant disservice to the true winner. Danny got screwed, which becomes another blemish on a fairly unremarkable season, save for the phenomenal job Kristen Kish did coming in to replace the almost irreplaceable Padma Lakshmi.
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