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Reviews
Strange Planet (2023)
Nathan W. Pyle Cash-out
I've long been a fan of Nathan W. Pyle's comic, its witty observations giving insight into just how strange and ritualistic humanity is in such a pithy, short format.
When I heard that there would be an animated adaptation, I thought at best it was going to be a series of 5 minute shorts but when I fired up Apple TV and saw the half-hour episodes, I had a bad feeling.
Each episode takes the (admittedly thin, but medium appropriate) concept of the little webcomic and tries to stretch it out only for the entire sheer fabric of the show to rip itself into a tattered waste of time.
Just read the webcomics and save yourself the 5 hours.
America's Test Kitchen: The Next Generation (2022)
Dull, strange, and uncomfortable. No one asked for this.
This is the unfortunate work of ATK's new Vice President of Television, Video, and Podcasts: Mark Levine. His entire Food Network career was spent stacking the slate with competition cooking shows like "Worst Cooks in America", "The Great Food Truck Race" and "Cutthroat Kitchen". He also has the inglorious honor of being the guy that thought that putting little kids in dangerous, high pressure cooking situations for TV drama was an ethical idea.
So it's no surprise that this feels very much at home with the tired, cookie-cutter content he's been churning out for well over 10 years as part of Food Network's post-instructional era. You can even see the direct lineage and combinations of ideas, concepts, and presentation taken from his earlier works.
That said, even though this is a weird, uninspired mixture of his previous programs, namely "Food Network Star" & "Cutthroat Kitchen", it doesn't work with the talent that ATK possesses and their usual on-screen personas. He's making nearly every ATK personality come off as incredibly petty and condescending; qualities that wouldn't make me vie for a job at ATK.
The contestants themselves are making the best of a weird situation but each Cutthroat-esque twist thrown their way doesn't add to the drama, it just makes things awkward as they refuse to play along with the production. I applaud them, throwing people under the bus during a job interview is never a good idea. If only the producers understood that too.
To top it all off, the promised rewards at the end of the series are confusing and make it plain that whomever wins will probably have as much lasting impact at ATK as the average Food Network Star winner had on the channel over it's 14 seasons, which is to say nearly none.
Just to drive this home, during the various confession cam segments the contestants talk not about their dreams of working under the ATK brand but what independent ventures they hope to finance using the $100K prize. I wish them the same luck that ex-ATK personalities like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt or Christopher Kimball have had after escaping ATK's clutches. Maybe they'll actually be able to win a James Beard award! :P
My advice: Stick to instructional content based around exhaustive experimentation and tough-love hardware reviews; this show is a bad look that was tired well before Mark left Food Network.
Foodtastic (2021)
Right artists but wrong time and wrong host.
Falling right among the busy rabble of shows like "Zumbo's Just Desserts", "Sugar High", "Crazy Delicious", "Nailed it", "Baking Impossible", and "Bake Squad" this new offering from Disney pits talented teams of bakers, food artists, architects, and fruit carvers against one another to build food-based dioramas based on various Disney IP.
Even though each fresh crop of talent does their best over the course of an episode thanks to minimal producer interruption and a healthy chunk of hours to toil away, it's the cringe-in-human-form host, her awkward intro/outro performances, and her just plain poor interaction skills with the teams that brings the entire production well below the crowd of similar programs.
Please Disney, ditch the community production drama queen and let the judges take over hosting duty with classic Disney talent brought in to deliver in-character lore and lead-ins instead through cameos and voice-overs!
Lastly, during a time when the grocery bill for most Americans is climbing higher and higher with each trip, it's a bit worrisome to see so much raw foodstuffs getting piled heaps upon heaps into mixed-media artworks that are woefully inedible. There is no culinary effort nor judge consideration made towards flavor in this show; this is about visuals plain and simple with everything you see created getting tossed after the cameras stop rolling. Yes, even that 50 lb block of cheddar caked in paint and fruit loops and those 300 sheetcakes crammed into chicken wire fencing and lumber.
At least the production goes out of their way to say that any unused materials will be donated to charity. Though I wonder if it would have been better for Disney just to skip this colorful, bandwagoning display and make one big donation to a needy food bank instead.
All in all, If you're hungry for more food sculpture contests and can stomach some obnoxious over-dramatic time wasting and lack of flavor, check it out. If not, there are so many better TV offerings out there that will leave a much better taste in your mouth long after the last bite.