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The Daily Beast: "Why I’m Tired of Top Chef"

Sometimes the things you once loved can disappoint you the most.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, entitled "Why I’m Tired of Top Chef," in which I take a look at the current season of Bravo's Top Chef, whose repetitive challenges, lackluster contestants, and Texas-sized problems have made watching this season a chore.

Everything is bigger in Texas, Bravo’s culinary competition Top Chef keeps reminding us, but the show, which airs Wednesday evenings, has never felt quite so irrelevant and predictable.

Now in its ninth season, Top Chef appears to be a pale imitation of its former self, a reality competition show that turned an often-mysterious world—the thought processes of highly trained chefs, their inspirations, and their imaginations—into something accessible and deeply understandable to the lay viewer. But that was before Bravo’s schedule was littered with various iterations of the Top Chef concept, variations that included pastry chefs, master chefs, and the original-flavor show that started it all. (A planned Top Chef Junior spinoff has wisely never seen the light of day.)

It seems that not a week goes by during the year that some form of the franchise is not airing … and by doing so, Bravo is swiftly running the Emmy-winning show into the ground. The Texas-based ninth season feels entirely tired, the result of overproducing, gimmicky challenges, sponsor tie-ins, and forced drama.

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