Letters to the Editor
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"Cooking Under Fire"
What happened to this great cook-off serial-elimination-gameshow program (I loathe the term reality television) that was on PBS last year? "Cooking Under Fire" was technically informative, not gratuitously overdramatic, and everybody -- contestants and judges alike -- was fundamentally understandable if not downright likeable. In other words, it had everything that makes "Project Runway" worth watching, even if you cared as little about restaurant cooking as I do about garment design.
Plus it managed to redeem, in my view, chef-judge Ming Tsai, who in his Food TV programming has always come across as a smarmy expert-on-everything who never seems to communicate any of the little technical details accurately.
Even better: no product placement, no commercial breaks, and, therefore, no tired pre-commercial slo-mo-video cliffhangs.