Everyone is Mad at Top Chef's Editors

No one liked how that last episode was edited. Was it because of wokeness??! It was, wasn't it! Gosh dang it!

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I watch most of my Top Chef episodes via screener, which is a nice little perk of having covered the show for years. The finale episode is a little different, in that the screener I get doesn’t have the final act revealing the winner (I guess they’re just that much more worried about some dumbass like me publishing too early and spoiling it). So when I wrote my final recap of Top Chef Wisconsin this past week, I had the whole thing basically written and ready to go before I’d seen that final act. Still, I was pretty confident I knew who it was based on how the episode had played out.

And then it turned out I was wrong!

Based on everything leading up to the final five minutes, I (along with my podcast cohost Joey Devine) was all but convinced the Wisconsin local (and “sentimental favorite,” per my preview) Dan Jacobs had the win all sewn up. “He just didn’t make any mistakes,” as Joey put it.

And then they announced the winner: Danny Garcia, the guy who’d looked like a lock to win for much of the season, but miscooked some lobster and had some raw pumpkin the judges didn’t love in the finale. You could say Danny had the more ambitious menu, and sure, but that’s just not at all how we’ve seen these things play out over the years. Undercooking multiple components usually writes your ticket home.

Turns out Joey and I weren’t alone in our surprise. #TopChef started trending on Twitter as soon as the finale aired on the East Coast, with a solid majority of respondents using the hashtag to register their surprise, shock, and, since this is the internet, anger. Host Tom Colicchio, bombarded by people yelling at him, quickly blamed the edit.

One user wrote in part “Finally watched BravoTopChef finale. Must have been horribly edited. Danny had the most issues and most critiques but is named Top Chef. Makes zero sense and from the responses I have seen on Twitter last night, I am not alone... tomcolicchio modern over flavor and execution?”

To which Tom responded, in clipped, Dad-on-social-media-ese: “Agree with your second sentence.”

To another, writing “Defend all you want, you wouldn’t have to if you made the right call,” Colicchio responded “Wouldn’t have to if the edit supported the outcome.”

Also: “if you heard the unedited hour and a half discussion it would have been clear Danny had the better meal.”

There were a lot more, but you get it. He blamed the edit. Sucks to be you, Magical Elves editor guy.

Gail Simmons said much the same thing on The Ringer’s Watch podcast (as transcribed by RealityBlurred):

If it was obvious that it was Danny the whole time. Dan cooked some amazing stuff, and he did cook consistently. But they cut out a lot of our criticisms of Dan, because they don’t want to make it obvious.

And I think what they do sometimes is bump up our criticism of the winner, because they don’t want to make it obvious.

What ends up happening is it sort of swings the other way, so the audience is going with that edit, and they only have us to trust as their taste buds. And what comes out sometimes is that it feels like the other person should have won.

Tom called me at 10 o’clock this morning with that same comment: Maybe they over-edited it. They swung it too far in the other direction in an effort to throw everyone off the scent.

Andy Dehnart at Reality Blurred goes further in describing how much the edit did a disservice to the winner:

For many of us, the finale presented a perplexing decision based on what we saw from the judges: a single note for Dan about tuna texture, but several typically disqualifying comments (seasoning, undercooked lobster) about Danny’s food.

For some unhinged people, this has been an opportunity to invent conspiracy theories about Bravo fixing the show for Danny, and dive into the comments of Facebook posts like this to feverishly type words such as “DEI winner” and “woke,” perhaps thinking those will conceal their racism or Islamophobia.

Danny does not deserve that; no reality TV show contestants deserve abuse.

I really shouldn’t be surprised when people manage to twist something into a referendum on DEI and wokeness, but lately I feel like I always am. Boeing’s planes keep falling apart because of cost-cutting and bad management? It was DEI! A boat crashes into a bridge? Wokeness! You do not, under any circumstances, “have to hand it to them,” but the sheer breadth of things you can turn into a DEI story if so inclined… wow.

Anyway, as it so happens, I actually have some experience in the reality show editing realm, as being a dailies editor on a reality show was my last internship in college (I think the statute of limitations is up on my NDA, though I did not consult a lawyer about this).

It’s true, you can invent basically any storyline you want, solely through the magic of editing. Cut from a shot of two people talking about someone to an isolated shot of that person looking angry (whether or not it actually happened at the same time or even in the same room), and boom! That person overheard and is furious! This is how most Vanderpump and drama-driven reality shows are edited, and I think viewers mostly understand that at this point. They simply suspend disbelief like they would for a fictional show. Editors can include shots and soundbites totally out of chronology and context to create certain impressions, if they want to.

As for things that happened that didn’t end up in the final cut (which was the bulk of what I was privy to as a dailies editor), there are a million reasons why that can happen. The audio wasn’t clean. There were people in the shot that didn’t sign a waiver. Something happened that might be bad press or have legal ramifications for the producers (the cast being plied with alcohol, doing drugs, or engaging in other “bad” behavior, which I saw a fair amount of). Or a camera person simply didn’t get the shot. It’s hard catching everything when no one has little marks on the floor they stand on so the camera always knows where they’ll be.

That being said, I generally don’t think most reality shows are just inventing storylines out of whole cloth. Not because I think they’re above it, more because I think people are generally too lazy for that. Inventing a story that didn’t exist at all just seems like a lot of work. Mostly I get the sense that the editors, and the producers they’re getting story notes from, get an impression of what went on, and what the characters’ personalities are like, and try to heighten it in the edit so that it’s conveyed clearly to the viewers (basic cable is not big on ambiguity or leaving things up for interpretaish).

Whether the surprising outcome of the Top Chef finale came down to the editors themselves or the producers who were giving them notes is impossible to say. Surely some combinaish of the two. It seems pretty clear that they were trying create a little mystery to an outcome that felt all too obvious — I had Danny pegged as the favorite for a good five episodes heading into the finale, as did most people who were watching. In the process, they probably overdid it.

I don’t think it’s quite fair to throw the editors, specifically, under the bus (to borrow a reality show cliché), but I have to agree with the consensus here. It’s not great when the outcome feels like this big a departure from what you just watched. Editing is like refereeing, it’s at its best when you don’t notice it. Every time a storyline feels overly manipulated, it chips away at the trust required to buy into the show as it’s happening. I don’t think the outcome “ruined” the season (though it was certainly unfair to the winner). More likely they were trying to put lipstick on a pig, as it were, and create a little drama during a season that was otherwise… well, kind of a dud.

I think maybe the show just got a little too confident casting this show like they’re actually trying to find the best up-and-coming chef in the country and not like they’re trying to make an entertaining TV show. Most of the competitors are so established in their careers and media trained by the time they get to the show now that maybe some of the character clashes and outsider charm that made it so great for all these years is missing. The last few seasons with really accomplished chefs worked out great (Buddha, Amar Santana, and Sara Bradley were all so different but so compelling in their own way), but maybe it’s too much to expect that, and this season was a wake-up call. It sort of depends on which you think the fluke was.

I did get to talk to one of the guest judges from the finale at a food event the other night. This judge did confirm to me that everyone’s food was good, and that Danny’s just seemed a little more ambitious and innovative. He also said Emeril drank like 10 glasses of Chardonnay, for what that’s worth. It’s those little details that keep me watching this show.