I get all this…that tag just left a really bad taste in my mouth, not just because it reintroduced a character I never warmed to, but because this season felt like the show had overcome its urge to always go for the OMG moment and apparently it hasn't.

Are you saying the writers "can't" reset Frank or that you don't want them to? I'd agree with the second sentiment, but this show resets Frank literally every season, so I don't buy the idea that because they've now gone this direction they have to stick with any kind of character growth for Frank next season. There's…

I didn't think was played for laughs either, but this show tries so many things that are not-quite-right tonally, it's never unreasonable to wonder if something that isn't funny is being played that way.

Definitely check out Get Your Goat. "Shake Your Halo Down" and "Love Catastrophe" are two of their greatest songs. The production is, ahem, unpolished, but the songs are great and sound like logical precursors to Pony Express.

Burrell by a long shot.

I'm genuinely grateful for this clarification.

Jamm works for me too, for whatever reason, but Thorpe and Packer don't.

Right, but I don't think for most of a reality competition's core audience, "fair" and "satisfying" are distinct terms.

Nobody here tasted the food. The problem with the "You didn't taste the food" argument is that it presumes that disagreement with the outcome requires experiential support, while agreement with it does not. It also presumes the infallibility of the judges, which is silly. Well-respected professionals make bad calls…

You're dead-on about the inherent flaws of the challenge. It wasn't at all clear to me whether the mentor chefs were telling them the elements that had to be in the dish or just brainstorming ideas with them, and I don't fault Nick for interpreting it as "We have to serve fried corn silk."

I think Nina would have made the ideal Talented Jerk character, if she had been more of a jerk. (I say "more of" because I've seen a lot of posts supportive of Nina that suggest she was saintly the entire season, and that's not what I saw. She got her digs in here and there.)

I concede that Top Chef has always been consistent in its application of the challenge-to-challenge elimination standard, which is another thing it has over PR, on which the judges have a bad habit of bringing in cumulative performance when it suits them and ignoring it when it doesn't.

You're right, but it's because the audience has no independent basis on which to conclude the judges made the right decision that the storytelling has to show me how they got there, and this finale didn't do that. It was edited to be a surprise upset, and the producers accomplished that goal, but at the cost of having…

"He complains that the judges use the standards they always use, rather than doing what makes most sense to him in this instance."

I trust Colicchio's breakdown represented the raw scores, but presenting them without context didn't clarify the result. More than the raw scores, if he wanted to offer an explanation of how the judges arrived at the result, he should have talked about why they chose to break the tie that way rather than the many…

Yeah, but the essay isn't really about how the judges felt about the food, it's about how the audience feels about the show. As a viewer, I'm supposed to invest in the outcome without being able to taste the food, and I'm supposed to make my own judgment, based on whatever criteria I see fit, about whether or not the…

Yeah, I think Hung's win was far more well-received at the time. He's the classic Talented Jerk, but it was hard to hold his arrogance against him because he had the talent.

I wrote "If the producers contrived this outcome…" because I have no way of knowing whether or not they did. And maybe they didn't at all, but that's the perception, and much like with the crafting of a reality show, the audience's perception of what happened is far more important than what actually happened. It's a…

By now, I think most people have accepted that reality television is anything but, that they employ writers to craft stories out of the footage that may or may not reflect what actually happened. That's why this particular backlash is interesting, because it shows that Top Chef has managed to portray a level of fair…

I don't think there would have been an issue if Nick's outburst hadn't been audible to the diners. Whether or not it's "justified," if I'm eating in a restaurant, and I hear someone yell "Goddammit!" from the kitchen, that's gonna spoil my experience.