Ellen Gray: Ramsay's back, more hellish than ever
HELL'S KITCHEN. 9 p.m. tomorrow, Channel 29. YOU'D THINK by now that anyone with a reservation for the opening night of a restaurant called Hell's Kitchen would know enough to eat before he or she arrived.
HELL'S KITCHEN. 9 p.m. tomorrow, Channel 29.
YOU'D THINK by now that anyone with a reservation for the opening night of a restaurant called Hell's Kitchen would know enough to eat before he or she arrived.
Because it's about as likely that diners will be served a complete meal before the evening's over as it is that Gordon Ramsay's going to make it through an episode of Fox's "Hell's Kitchen" without being bleeped and blurred (the latter to keep lip-readers from discovering he's not actually shouting "Fudge!").
If there's anything different as the cooking competition series enters its fourth season tomorrow night, it's that Ramsay and Fox have embraced his cartoonish persona more enthusiastically than ever.
A reference to him as "the dark lord" may confuse "Harry Potter" fans, but next to Ramsay, who seems to live on full boil, Lord Voldemort gives off little heat. And Satan probably never worked a dinner service.
Still, they, too, would probably disapprove of a chef whose "signature dish" includes scallops, caviar, capers - and white chocolate.
No, there's nothing new under the sun - or the heat lamps - at "Hell's Kitchen," where big egos go to be deflated by an even bigger one, but it's still a salty delight, thanks to the casting people who bring Ramsay his victims.
This season, they include a height-challenged sous chef who overcompensates with a very tall toque, an executive chef who boasts he's "the black Gordon Ramsay," a Mr. Mom and the guy with the white chocolate problem.
Yes, there are women, and no doubt some of them will be shown to be nut jobs before the season's over. But it's clear by now that the "Hell's Kitchen" recipe requires at least one scene every episode in which Ramsay slices and dices one of his fellow men, then serves him up with a nice chianti.
Bon appetit.
Blast from the past
One of the quainter curiosities of "Father Knows Best: Season One," a four-DVD set that goes on sale tomorrow, is an episode that was never broadcast.
Commissioned in 1959 by the U.S. Treasury, it's a semi-creepy advertisement for U.S. Savings Bonds called "24 Hours in Tyrantland" in which insurance salesman Jim Anderson (Robert Young) tries to enlist his family's help in selling the bonds.
When the Anderson kids resist the hard sell (and suggest that rather than talking about preserving our way of life, the government just remind people that bonds are a good investment), Jim loses his legendary cool, sentencing the trio to 24 hours in a totalitarian society.
Yes, boys and girls, the '50s were glorious.
Of course, if "Father Knows Best" were on the air today, the "Tyrantland" episode, which was co-produced by the AFL-CIO, would probably be considered broadcast-worthy.
The hard sell on savings bonds hardly seems out of place next to the corporate shilling that's being done in every single episode of Fox's "American Idol," or even the increasingly obvious product placement that's crept into one scripted show after another in recent years.
And if you think that television's moved past the point where performers are expected to wear their patriotism on their sleeves, then you probably didn't see all three "Idol" judges - even the Brit - falling all over themselves last week to congratulate Kristy Lee Cook for choosing to save herself for one more week with Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA." *
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