One Piece: Live Action Anime for the Ted Lasso Era

I should probably preface this by saying that I am not much of an anime fan.  I’ve tried, I remember watching shows on Cartoon Network’s Toonami after school and not really connecting with most of them, save for one.  Gundam Wing.  I was immediately drawn in; the show had everything I was looking for.  Political intrigue, giant robots, complicated moral quandaries, giant robots, likable and (relatively) relatable characters, giant robots, and giant robots.  As I write this, I have a Tallgeese action figure (my favorite mobile suit, as the giant robots are called) and a Gundam Deathscythe on my desk.  Needless to say, it left an impression on me, that even subsequent Gundam series haven’t matched.  Much to my simultaneous chagrin and relief, there’s never been a live action Gundam series, so I don’t have to fret about the fidelity or quality of any adaptation.  So after watching live action anime adaptions fail one after another when not even the source material for most of them resonated with me, I wasn’t exactly champing at the bit when I heard about Netflix’s One Piece live action.

Monkey D. Luffy points out over the East Blue towards adventure.

Truth be told, I was so unfamiliar with One Piece that I often mixed it up with One Punch Man, another anime that I didn’t watch.  However, one late night, I found myself drawn to it.  With no familiarity with the source material, I thought I could at least approach it with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions as to how the show is suppose go, look, or feel.  And, frankly, it was kind of a liberating experience.  So many of the things I watch are steeped in decades of lore and nostalgia and my own experiences as a kid with an IP such as, say, Star Wars, colors how I engage with and enjoy it now.  I can’t sit down and watch Ahsoka without being reminded of how much I disliked the prequel trilogy, but on the other hand, I am also reminded of how much I liked the Clone Wars series and how much I loved Rebels.  However, with nothing to draw on, I could just dim the lights and watch.  I could do something so rare in media these days, especially when you consume as much of it as I do—I could watch something novel and experience it for the first time, completely clean.

And I loved it.  I did.  I had no idea what to expect and yet when all the pieces of the puzzle were in place, it just felt right. Every character was likable and when you can pull off that minor miracle, you can get away with almost anything.  At least for me, anyway.  If I can connect with the characters, sympathize and empathize with them, care about their plights and journeys, it can cover all manner of sins in the other aspects of storytelling.

Emily Rudd puts in an excellent performance as Nami, seen here doing boat stuff. Probably, I’m not a sailor.

But, before I get into that, I guess I should give you a little bit of a background on One Piece.  It follows the story of a young man who wishes nothing more than to become a pirate and find the “One Piece”, which, if I’m completely honest, I don’t exactly know what that is.  I don’t believe it’s a bathing suit that covers the stomach, but rather the treasure hidden by notorious pirate Gold Roger, its existence he divulged as he was publicly executed by the Marines.  Or possibly it’s a map to that treasure?  The young man, ridiculously named Monkey D. Luffy, dreams of finding the One Piece and becoming King of the Pirates.  I’m not sure what that title entails or how it’s supposed to work, but he barrels forward with the enthusiasm of a young Ash Ketchum, telling everyone who will listen both his name and his goal, and the relentless positivity of Ted Lasso eating cotton candy while chewing bubblegum.  Seriously.  It’s a lot at first, but Iñaki Godoy plays Luffy with such convincing sincerity that you can’t help but root for him.  As he recklessly moves through the seas, he picks up a ragtag crew (as if there is any other kind) as well as picking up a fair few enemies along the way.

Pretty bold of them to slip in an episode of The Bear and think I wouldn’t notice.

Each one in the crew gets a full backstory, three dimensional characterization, and depth that often main protagonists can lack in television shows.  They’re not just support characters—they’re real people and they feel real, at least in the context of a world where a person can eat a fruit and gain physics- and logic-defying powers.  That alone is a kind of a triumph in storytelling, as many shows use their secondary characters as a mechanism to simply drive the plot forward—they pipe in with the jargony explanation at just the right moment, they do the real investigative work while the main characters flirt with each other, etc.—but not here.  One Piece is Luffy’s story, sure, but it’s also theirs, and the show makes sure they never get left behind.

At the core of each character in Luffy’s crew is a deep goodness that radiates through all their actions.  None of this is more evident than with Luffy himself, as he bids farewell to a friend who is joining the Marines—the enemy of pirates everywhere—and Luffy commends him in following his dreams and assures him that they’re friends no matter what side of the fight they’re on.  But whether a gruff swordsman, tale-spinning raconteur, misanthropic thief, or skilled culinary artist, each of Luffy’s crew has kindness in their hearts, even if sometimes it takes Luffy to help bring it out.  And much like the show itself, initial impressions are only part of the story, as the characters unfold and grow and endear themselves to you in properly magical ways.

“We are men of action, lies do not become us” is not something Usopp would ever say. That’s Princess Bride.

I’ve always felt that live action anime adaptations don’t work and can’t work because anime is such a specific thing—it’s hard to pin down what makes anime special or different from other media as someone who doesn’t watch much of it, but I can tell from what little I’ve seen that it’s not much like other genres of entertainment that I do watch regularly.  So in an effort to smooth out the strangeness, for lack of a better word, of many anime titles, live action adaptations lose that je ne sais quoi that anime has, simultaneously losing fans of the source material and failing to bring in new ones.  And yet, standing tall in the shadow of Cowboy Bebop’s failure, One Piece manages to take the biggest heart stuffed into a show since Ted Lasso and win me over completely.

At first, when I watched the show, I thought it was good fun—a bit silly, a bit over the top, but a fun show in a time when fun is very much welcome.  But as the episodes progressed and the outer layers of the artichoke were cut away, revealing the heart, I was stunned by the surprising depth and emotional affect that it had on me.  I laughed wholeheartedly, I cared about the characters, and I shed more than one tear as their journeys and stories unfolded.  I don’t want to go into too many details, because if you aren’t familiar with it, like I wasn’t, I don’t want to spoil your ability to go in fresh and experience it for the first time without being colored too much by prior knowledge.  I will say, though, that there’s a guy who carries three katanas and that is awesome.  One time through the first season wasn’t enough for me, I’m going to have to watch it again.  And maybe a third time.  But not a fourth.  Okay, probably a fourth, but definitely fewer than eleven times.  Well, we’ll see.

Times change; when I was a kid, they used to say not to sleep in a hammock with your sword because you’ll cut your stuff off. I still think it’s good advice.

[If you’ve made it this far, I would like to change gears for a moment and say that I fully support and stand in solidarity with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.  Though it means that projects I love may be delayed or cancelled, what they are fighting for is important and I support their efforts for fair pay; none of the wonderful works of art we get to enjoy beamed into our homes would be possible without them and they deserve fair compensation for the work they do that delights us on a daily basis.]

The Big Door Prize Answers The Most Painful Question Imaginable

Maybe you missed the Ted Lasso train.  Maybe, like me, you still haven’t come around on Jason Segel, so you were hesitant to watch Shrinking (which I’m glad I did, despite my reservations about Segel).  Maybe someone split your brain in two and you watched Severance at work, so you don’t remember it when you’re at home reading this.  So you didn’t watch Wolfwalkers because you thought it was just for kids.  Maybe you’re well-adjusted and without insecurity, so you didn’t cry for 34 minutes straight while you watched The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.  In case you missed all those shows and movies, I’m here to inform you that Apple TV has some really good stuff on it.  And the latest triumph of Apple TV’s short tenure is The Big Door Prize.

Apparently the early 2000s have finally reached the small town of Deerfield

While the pilot goes to some very pilot-y lengths to set up the season’s story by throwing you off the deep end into a swimming pool of trailer-friendly, heavy-handed one-liners, the show quickly settles into an interesting narrative.  Using its small town setting to its advantage, The Big Door Prize plays with the spread of information through Deerfield’s denizens against what it shows you to great effect.  Information spreads through the town like a virus, but you don’t always get to see it when you want to.  The show makes you wait, makes you all but plead to find the information it teases in front of you.  The premise of the show is a new manifestation of that old video game urban legend.  Like so many Polybius machines that allegedly mysteriously appeared and then as mysteriously all disappeared, a large, butterfly-themed Morpho arcade cabinet shows up in the local grocer’s store while the stock boy Jacob is out back getting blazed.  No one knows where it came from.  No one knows how it got there.  The owner of the store didn’t order it, he was as confused as his stoned employee.  Jacob posits that it’s some kind of game, after he tries it out for himself.

Unlike a regular arcade cabinet, however, you climb into it through a butterfly wing door, insert your coins, and enter your social security number and hand prints.  Once the data-mining (the alleged purpose of the Polybius cabinets) is complete, rather than play a game, the machine promises to deliver you a little blue card with your life’s potential on it.

Right there.  In writing.  The most your life can amount to.

Why the hell would you ever want to know that?

Maybe I’m just getting old, but the more I look at the doors that have closed behind me, the more I find myself wondering why anyone would want to know what possible life could have existed behind them.  The protagonist of the series, Chris O’Dowd’s Dusty, is a high school history teacher with a daughter in high school, so there’s naturally a large age split in the characters.  So, maybe I’m not looking at this through the eyes of the high schooler I once was, but being in my 30s, the idea of knowing my full potential is the worst possible thing I can think of.

One by one, like little confused penguins, the citizens of Deerfield succumb to the temptation of the Morpho machine, whether enthusiastically or begrudgingly.  Some hide their cards. Some throw them out.  Some get their picture taken with them and put on the wall at the market, like some kitschy restaurant’s tacky sports memorabilia.  Some residents even make their potentials into sweatshirts and wear them in the same brilliant shade of blue that the cards are printed on.  I get it, it’s a pretty shade and blue is my favorite color, but that’s a bit much for me. .

It’s a lovely play on temptation; a classic Tree of Knowledge situation.  No good can come of knowing what that card is going to say, but not knowing can feel even worse.  Dusty grows obsessed with the Morpho machine, often derailing his own lesson plans to discuss the machine with his students.  He finds a card with an upsetting potential in the trash and it sends him down a different direction, spiraling towards and against the Morpho machine at the same time.  People’s cards seem to have the same effect on them; the town residents go on making huge life changes after getting their fortune told by their modernized Zoltar machine.  Buying a motorcycle, William Telling in the front yard with your kid’s head holding the apple, or taking a full on life pivot to be the next David Blaine, it seems at every turn Dusty’s friends and neighbors are making major life changes based on a word or two printed on a card that came from a magical machine that only takes quarters.

I’m not clear how many quarters it takes to tell you your life’s ultimate potential, but it seems like it would be a lot

It all makes me return to my original question.  Not every potential can be great, right?  A rural town where every single person is destined for greatness would be quite the geographical oddity indeed, even moreso than the town that’s two weeks from everywhere.  Why would you ever want to know it?  If you’re a young person, maybe it would be interesting to know how far you could go.  Or maybe the weight of expectation would rest on your shoulders like Sisyphus’s rock, a daily burden to be carried until the end of time.  If, like me, you’ve got a few decades under your belt, why would you want to open the door to what could have been?  What could ever be printed on that card other than a road map to pain?  All you’ve got are two possible answers.  Your life is all that it can be.  Your life is not what it could be.  Sure, if you’re happy in where you are, an elusive state of being so hard to find, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s even an attainable goal, finding out you’ve reached your potential could be a comfort.  Although, it does beg the question; if you are content with how your life is going, what does it matter what some card says anyway? You could just be happy the way things are and never look for any external validation. But even if only one percent of you wanted more or wondered what could have been different or had any regrets, how could knowing that where you are, what you are, is as far as you could possibly go be a good thing?  And if it’s not, if you find out you could have been or still could be more, you’re faced with either the realization that you’ll never reach your greatest potential or you have to weigh blowing up your life to reach it.  Or still, and possibly even worse, do you decide that your potential is something you won’t strive for, something you’re not willing to throw away everything you’ve built, not willing to fundamentally change your understanding of yourself for?  Do you settle for the life you have?  What does it mean if you decide to change?  What would you leave behind? Who would you leave behind?

I know I don’t need to know, but I just need to know. Don’t I?

How can you even boil down a person’s life potential to a one or two word statement printed on Vistaprint’s card stock?  How do you sum up a person’s life into a business card that you can sit around and compare with others?  It can’t be possible.  There’s no way the nuance and facets of a person’s life could be summed up in a book, not even an Infinite Jest sized tome; people are far too complex to be made into a business card.  You’re not your fucking khakis, you’re not what a card says you are or can be.

But that’s the brilliance of the show.  Even having said all that, knowing what I know, feeling what I feel about the Morpho machine, stating unequivocally that there’s nothing good that can come from inserting your quarters into that machine, I know, I just know, I’d be tempted by it.  I’m not sure I’d be able to hold my curiosity.  I know that I don’t want to know if this is all I could be.  I know that I don’t want reassurance that my life will never improve, I get enough of that from that annoying voice inside my head.  People are striving for better everyday, in all walks of life, whatever better means to them, and it’s hard work.  There’s no magic turnaround, no card that can make it happen.  But at the same time, knowing that it’s out there, that some machine is capable of telling me that I’m going to become a best selling author (or at least I’ll finally finish my novel) or I’ll argue in front of the Supreme Court or that more than the five people I send this blog to will read it, I’m not sure I’d be able to keep myself from finding out what that destructive little card will say.  In the face of such temptation, what saint among us could possibly resist?  The Big Door Prize, at least after watching the first three episodes, is not the feel good romp that Ted Lasso is.  It’s not the deep, lore-laden mystery of Severance.  It’s not the story of someone struggling to pick up the pieces like Shrinking.  It’s a story of people tearing themselves apart in pursuit of what could have been.  Of temptation overpowering their better angels.  And I don’t know what they’re going to find at the end of it all, but I want to find out.

The Legendary Kevin Conroy

It’s strange for me, being someone who uses words for a living and for his hobby (that I hope to turn full time at some point) to be at a loss for them.  But that’s where I’ve been since I heard about the passing of Kevin Conroy.  Admittedly, I don’t know much about the man himself (his contribution to DC Pride 2022, “Finding Batman” is high on my to be read list, but I don’t have the tears left to read it right now), but I make no exaggeration when I say that he was as strong an influence on me and the man that I’ve become as any other person or piece of media that I’ve experienced.  Putting into words what Kevin Conroy means to me will not be easy.  But I have to try.  I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t do my part to share with you this man’s great legacy.

It would be simple for me just to tell you how good Batman: The Animated Series was, how it just might be the best cartoon of all time, and how it’s a piece of media that’s genuinely for all ages.  But so many hands went into making that animated giant the pillar of storytelling that it is—writers, animators, directors, everyone on the technical side about which I know very little.  I want to just focus on Bruce Wayne and Batman—and Kevin Conroy’s beyond iconic performance in the series and in others, bringing Batman to life in a way that defined the character for multiple decades and for at least one entire generation, if not more.

Kevin Conroy’s Batman was simply the definitive performance.  When Christian Bale was cast in the excellent Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy, it wasn’t Michael Keaton I measured him against.  It certainly wasn’t Val Kilmer or George Clooney, that’s for sure.  And it wasn’t even the great Adam West, either.  It was Kevin Conroy.  For many people, their childhood was defined by people like the incredible Mr. Rogers or Bob Ross, or Elmo and Big Bird on Sesame Street.  And sure, I watched them too (with the exception of Bob Ross, somehow I missed that train), but for me, it was Batman to whom I looked to for moral guidance.

And he did not disappoint.  You may think of Batman in terms of the large, spectacular set pieces from the movies or the fantastical villains he often found himself going up against, but it was always the quieter moments of Conroy’s Batman that made the most impact on me.

In the episode “It’s Never Too Late”, Batman deals with a mob war raging in Gotham—a younger, rising mobster wants his elder rival out of the way so he can have his run of Gotham’s streets.  And yet, it’s not Batman’s punches that resolve the issue; sure he probably could have descended violently through one of Gotham’s many skylights and beat the mob bosses senseless, but he takes another course of action.  He takes the elder mob boss on a tour of his old neighborhood so he can see the destruction his criminal empire has wrought.  Drug addiction runs rampant, with the boss’s own son in a rehabilitation facility, suffering from withdrawal.  Now, it’s not just that the topics are incredibly mature for what is ostensibly a kids’ show, but what is remarkable is how the show handles it with such delicate empathy.  Addicts aren’t shown as degenerate, they aren’t demonized.  Conroy’s Batman see them as human beings—victims of a nefarious organization that creates, feeds, and profits from their pain.  Though the mobster decides to take things into his own hands at first, he’s ultimately brought back from the brink by an old friend who convinces him to end his criminal career and cooperate with the police.  Yes, there’s some punching, but it’s the showing of humanity that wins the day.

Conroy brought some very real world humanity to the character of Batman as well.  In the episode “Nothing to Fear”, Batman is dosed with Scarecrow’s fear toxin.  And what are his hallucinations about?  What are his deepest fears?  Not bats, not dying in a fight with Mark Hamill’s Joker; no, nothing like that.  It’s bringing shame to his family by doing what he’s doing.  This resonated with me deeply.  As the first generation born to immigrant parents, you don’t always get to live for yourself.  Pressure is put on you, unfairly, to live up to the sacrifices your parents made to give you the life you have.  To see Batman, the greatest hero I had ever seen, struggling with those same feelings, fearing that he’s taken what was given to him and wasted it not only weighed heavily on my shoulders, but showed me that I wasn’t alone.  I may not have been able to express this or fully understand it as a child but when Bruce Wayne hears his father’s voice telling him that he failed him, I understand that now.  I know what that feels like.  And if my greatest hero felt these things and found a way to push through, then I knew it was possible.  I knew I could do it too.

In one of the most touching episodes, “Appointment in Crime Alley”, Roland Daggett denigrates and terrorizes those living in the aptly named “Crime Alley”, only to have Batman thwart his plans to illegally evict, in Daggett’s words, “the underclass” in the name of progress (and his own profit; Daggett’s role as a foil to both Bruce Wayne and Batman is on full display in this episode).  The details aren’t important, but as the episode comes to a close, Conroy’s Batman reassures longtime friend and confidant Leslie Thompkins that no matter how bad things seem at the time, that good people still lived in Crime Alley.  His view of Crime Alley’s denizens is completely divorced from their socioeconomic status.  How he saw them had nothing to do with their income or poverty, their circumstances, or anything like that.  They were human, they deserved respect and dignity, and Batman saw them that way without any judgment—a stark contrast to the unfeeling and villainous Daggett.  People are not their salary.  They are not their struggles.  They are not their small apartment in a rundown building, they are not anything that people like Roland Daggett would use to make them feel like less.  Batman saw that.  And he taught a generation to see that too.

In “Perchance to Dream”, the Mad Hatter creates a literal dream scenario in which Bruce Wayne’s parents are still alive and he’s engaged to his love Selina Kyle, but partly because he couldn’t envision a world where Bruce Wayne does nothing to right the wrongs he sees in his fair city (and partly because you can’t read in a dream), he’s able to wake up and put a stop to the Hatter’s schemes.  In the episode “I Am The Night”, Batman struggles with self doubt again, wondering if he’s actually making a difference.  How human is that?  The episode ends with his hero, Commissioner Gordon—his surrogate father—telling him how he inspires him, how he makes him want to be a hero, and how you can never stop fighting for good, and Batman is renewed.

And that’s what Kevin Conroy’s Batman did for me.  He taught me so much about compassion and empathy, that failure and self doubt are normal, that failing doesn’t meaning you’re a failure as long as you keep trying.  That doing right has a cost that is always worth paying and that there are always people worth standing up for.  He taught me that if, at the end of the day, you have any strength left to give, that you should do something to help people.  As little or as much as you’re capable of giving.  Just keep trying.  Because trying counts, even if you come up short.  This is just a small sample of Kevin Conroy’s excellent performances that had a profound impact on me.  There were many more in this series, let alone his performances as Batman in other series as well, like Justice League, that gave so much to those who watched and listened.  I will never stop missing Kevin Conroy.  I will never stop mourning him.  But I will also never forget the lessons I learned from him.  And all I can do is thank him for that.  I wish I had a chance to do it when he was still alive, but now that he is gone, I can still share it with you.  Kevin Conroy was such a formative figure in my life.  If you peel back the leaves of my artichoke heart, Kevin Conroy’s Batman is one of the things at the center that still drives me today at my core.  It’s his voice that I hear when I’m going through tough times.  It’s his voice that helps me still believe that there are good people in the world trying to do good.  He is vengeance.  He is the night.  He is Batman.  Always.

Do Not Lick Your Television, Pt. 1

I love food.  I’ve never loved the term foodie, but there you have it.  That’s what I am.  Food is such an interesting thing—necessary to live, of course, but it can be as basic as you want or it can be elevated to an art form.  But I’m not here just to talk about food, obviously, that’s not what this blog is about.  Although, I did just do exactly that recently with the delightful podcaster Tom Zalatnai on their podcast No Bad Food, where we discussed the deeper meaning of the pre-dinner bread basket, among other things, if you’d like to check that out.  No, of course I’m not just talking about food.  I’m talking about food TV.

Be forewarned.  There will be food puns.  I’m trying my best not to, but they’re going to creep in and there’s nothing I can do about it.

My first and formative experience with food TV was Iron Chef America.  Flipping channels one day led me to an episode of Iron Chef America and I was reminded of a story of a friend and a destroyed kitchen inspired by the original Iron Chef, so I stuck with it.  That was that for me.  It was the thing that turned me into a foodie.  It’s why I own multiple books by Bobby Flay.

Other shows have caught my attention since then.  Netflix’s Chef’s Table and Salt Fat Acid Heat are particularly good ones, as well as Hulu’s Padma Lakshmi hosted Taste the Nation.  Food is so cultural, it’s infinitely interesting to me to see different dishes from varying cultures and learn why they are the way they are.  Food has its own evolution as well.  And Chef’s Table is a celebration of food artistry that boggles the mind at times.  As beautifully shot and arranged as the dishes themselves, Chef’s Table has become essential viewing for any food lover.  But I always came back to Iron Chef America.

And luckily, Iron Chef is back, this time on Netflix and this time in the form of Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend.  Needless to say, I was chuffed to bits to see Iron Chef back on the small screen.  If you’re not familiar with the Iron Chef formula, the Chairman (actor Mark Dacascos, whom you may remember from the Hawaii 5-0 reboot, if you were unfortunate enough to have watched it, or John Wick 3) has a stable Iron Chefs—chefs who are at the top of their game, delivering meals of incredibly high quality and artfulness in restaurants across the world—who take on a challenger in a culinary gauntlet.  The rules have changed a little over the years, but the gist of it is that there is a secret ingredient that must be featured in each dish of a five course meal.  Sometimes an early dish had to be delivered, sometimes a “culinary curveball” was thrown and mid-challenge a new element was introduced to be used in one of the dishes of the chefs’ choice.  But overall it’s a simple recipe—one secret ingredient, a time crunch, and the boundless creativity of chefs at the forefront of the profession.

This time around, however, things are a bit different.  Gone is the original Kitchen Stadium.  The switch from the Food Network to Netflix probably necessitated the change, but I was sad to see the classic arena go.  It was tight, it was close quarters, and it was frenetic.  The new Kitchen Stadium is slick, state of the art, and Coliseum-like in its structure and scale.  The time limit changes from episode to episode; sometimes it’s the standard 60 minutes, sometimes it’s 70, and I think one time it was even 75.  We’re back to having three judges, but the judging is now…strange.  Three judges would score an initial dish out of a total of 25 points and the chefs were judged on three criteria (taste, originality in the use of the secret ingredient, and plating) for a total of 100 points.  I’ve always been pretty good at math, but even a first grader wouldn’t need to break out the TI-83 to figure out that neither 25 nor 100 divide by three.  They also stopped showing the points breakdown by category, so all transparency in scoring is gone. I don’t know what one chef did over the other to win a tight match anymore and that takes a good deal of the fun out of it.  As a result, the final score feels arbitrary, leaving you with only the edited comments of the judges to guess at what one chef excelled at over the other.

The new, larger Kitchen Stadium gives chefs and their teams more room to breathe, but the downside is that some of that manic energy of the kitchen has been lost, replaced with background music meant to amp up the drama.  But it actually takes away from the action.  The sounds of the kitchen are all the drama Iron Chef ever needed.  I remember when I tried to watch Baking It on Peacock, a Great British Baking Show/Bake-Off (I never know what to call it ever since I was informed it was called different things in the US and UK markets) style baking competition hosted by Maya Rudolph and Jake Peralta’s alter ego, Andy Samberg, the pervasive and nonstop background Christmas music slowly drove me insane.  It was like being stuck in a department store elevator on Christmas Eve that only had public domain music to play, so every moment you were trying to figure out what song was mercilessly attacking your senses, but you could never quite put your finger on which song it was.  The music has to go.  The cooking is dramatic enough.  Also, the changing time limits resulted in a few episodes where the Iron Chefs were almost relaxed, joking around, seemingly free of the pressure cooker that is supposed to be Kitchen Stadium.  That never would have happened in Iron Chef America.  That’s not to say I don’t want the chefs to have fun with it and of course the Iron Chefs themselves are supposed to be more seasoned and in control than their challengers, but it should never be easy.  If it’s easy, it shouldn’t be a competition.  It’s easy for me to boil some water, toss in a box of bucatini and put it all together with some freshly grated cheese, olive oil, and melted butter, while watching episodes of Stranger Things on my iPad, but that would make for a terrible TV show.  No one wants to watch me leisurely make a half-ass cacio e pepe in my kitchen.  The time crunch is half the fun of Iron Chef.

It’s not all bad, though.  Returning as the host is Alton Brown, and he seems to be back to normal.  For a while he’d adopted a very “reality competition host/culinary Simon Cowell” energy that was very off-putting, but I didn’t really experience that this time around, which was a pleasant surprise.  An even more pleasant surprise was the addition of chef Kristen Kish as a full on cohost.  No longer is there a floor reporter; Kish and Brown are equals and both take forays into the stadium to talk to chefs about their respective dishes.  And this time around, they actually get to sit and eat with the judges, which is, at the very least, nice for them.  Because I know sitting at home and only being able to look at the tantalizing dishes can be torture at times, I can’t imagine being courtside and smelling all that wonderful food and not being able to partake.  Then there’s the quest aspect of the show.  Rather than gathering a bunch of chefs and pitting them against each other, the way The Next Iron Chef did, the highest scoring challenger returns at the end of the season to take on the entire Iron Chef roster in one knockdown drag out battle to see if they will be crowned the next Iron Legend.  What it means to be an Iron Legend, I don’t know.  But it seems interesting. And these Iron Chefs may be new, but they’re a force to be reckoned with. My particular favorite, Dominique Crenn, shines in the series. And while I haven’t yet had the pleasure of eating at one of her restaurants, my brother has, and he said the food was so good that he literally licked the plate. Suffice it to say, Atelier Crenn is certainly high on my restaurant wish list.

The challenges are bolder now—sometimes including both a secret ingredient and a theme, such as street food.  Sometimes they can go too big, losing focus and adding things like football player sous chefs, but overall, it’s not the worst thing that’s happened to the show. Yes, saddling chefs with guest stars as members of their team is a few steps too far and hurts the integrity of the competition. Top kitchens operate in a very specific, regimented fashion, and it doesn’t feel like you can get the best out of the competitor or the Iron Chef if you surprise insert a celebrity.  I don’t mind too much theming the challenges along with having a secret ingredient, especially if you make them incongruous, but it really needs to be pared back a little.  It all smacks of trying too hard.  There’s only so much that needed to be added to the pot to make it a great show on its own, but theming and the guests and the over the top Chairman, it’s completely unnecessary.  Iron Chef America was excellent as is.  I know, evolve or die, but there is such a thing as too much.

If there’s one thing that the Great British Oven Thingy has taught us, it’s that the cooking can be plenty fun and dramatic on its own, even if it doesn’t get contentious, the way so many American competition shows force themselves to be and thankfully Iron Chef doesn’t lose that good natured core it had before.  Even though some of these changes are positive, I still can’t help but feel some of the magic is gone.  However, it’s not irreparable.  Dump some of the music, tune the microphones to pick up more of Kitchen Stadium, set the challenge length back to an immutable 60 minutes, and return transparency to the scoring, and this shell of its former self will certainly recapture its former glory.  It’s just a few tweaks, Netflix, and you can make Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend even better than Iron Chef America was.  Dial back the theatrics and let these amazing culinary talents be the ones who bring the drama.  Please?