In 1996 I was living in Chicago—how did I miss the radio broadcast of This American Life’s “A Night at the Wiener Circle”? (It played on local air only, though a televised version aired on Showtime in 2007.) Host Ira Glass spent a dark night of the soul in this North Side hot dog stand. By day it’s a place where you can get a pretty awesome Chicago dog and cheese fries covered with a tangy clot of orange sauce. But on weekend nights after the bars close, the Wiener’s Circle looks an awful lot like you'd imagine the 10th circle of hell to look, a place where drunk-ass white boys gleefully abuse the African-American counter staff, and the staff responds by gleefully calling them drunk-ass white-boy motherfuckers in return. It’s pure shtick.

Though as Glass revealed, the more time you spend at the Wiener’s Circle, the less it feels like some hilarious college food fight and the more it begins to smell like class warfare with a racialized edge: black fast-food workers serving pampered-looking white people, their inhibitions dissolved in a wash of cheap beer.

As a guy who at times has been a drunk-ass white boy, I believe I’m qualified to say that it’s all more than a little disturbing.

That didn’t stop the people at truTV from thinking it would make a riveting game show. In March, the reality/trash-TV network premiered The Wiener’s Circle, a show that, truTV’s website says, “puts the cuss in customer service.” In the 30-minute show (six are airing this season), Wiener’s Circle manager Poochie Jackson (center) and her four-member crew lead customers in a series of game-show challenges where the grand prize is a free meal.

The action seems unscripted, spontaneous: Customers stagger up to the order window, take some verbal abuse from the staff, and agree to do stupid challenges. They answer questions, show off drunk dance moves, compete in predictably nasty eat-offs, or just embarrass themselves. Meanwhile, Jackson and the Circle staff call everybody bitches and motherfuckers.

“That’s one ugly-ass sweater,” Jackson yells at a white college boy with glazed eyes on a recent episode. “Take that shit off!” He does, as Kim, the cashier, gives him and his bro a challenge. “Gimme the name of one person who was involved in the civil rights movement.”

They struggle; head cook Yolanda tries to help. “Can you name the lady who wouldn’t get off the goddamn bus?”

“Eleanor Roosevelt,” answers the bro, a doofus in a beanie. FAIL! Jackson orders them out of the restaurant. “These are the dumbest drunk fools I’ve ever seen in my life,” she says. In another segment, Jackson asks an African-American couple to name three “dumb-ass” things white people like. “Celine Dion!” “Eggnog!” “Seinfeld!” “Sarah Jessica Parker!” Answers pour in from contestants, bystanders, and the Circle crew, a rare moment of solidarity.

On the Showtime version of This American Life, the Wiener's Circle appeared as one segment in a themed episode called "Pandora's Box." The implication: Once you lose your social inhibitions at a late-night hot dog stand filled with drunks, what comes out of your mouth is liable to be darkly revealing, not pretty or nice. The name of the Circle's segment: "In Wiener Veritas."

Whether revisiting the Wiener's Circle in reality game-show format is socially redeeming is an open question. If you’re sober, you can see it as a document of social inequality in a supposedly post-racial America, feel seriously appalled, and then click over to Dancing with the Stars. If, like me, you stumble onto The Wiener’s Circle when drunk, you might think it’s extremely hilarious, before realizing that, yeah, it’s a document of social inequality in a supposedly post-racial America, only one you can’t stop watching. Also, it makes you hungry for cheese fries.

The Wiener's Circle airs on truTV Tuesdays at 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific Time, 9 p.m. Central.

Image source: truTV.com

In Food Forward’s 30-minute pilot episode, the producers take a cross-country road trip to show how Americans are turning rooftops, empty lots, and abandoned buildings into farms.

What’s cool about Food Forward is the way it makes the case for urban ag as a powerful grassroots movement, without drawing on the usual clichés. No Michael Pollan or Alice Waters here talking about feedlots or farmers’ markets, only a fresh cast of urban farmers in places as unlikely as Milwaukee and the Bronx; men and women MacGyvering local fixes to a food industry overtaken by massive production and distribution systems. They're like the poor folk standing up to the corrupt elites of Panem in The Hunger Games.

For me, the most amazing scenes in Food Forward take place in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood, a place so scarred by poverty and crime it resembles the post-apocalypse. Like a set for the AMC zombie series The Walking Dead, it’s a place of abandoned houses and weirdly quiet streets.

Suddenly, Edith Floyd cuts through the squalor on a bright red tractor. Floyd is a middle-aged urban farmer who plants food gardens in abandoned Corktown lots. She seems patient but determined in her quest to have the city grant her farming rights to abandoned property. Floyd seems to have pretty much the same sense of purpose as another Corktown farmer, Travis Roberts, a kid who took up urban chicken farming (he sells hundreds of eggs a week to local restaurants). Between holding up a pair of adorable pit puppies, Roberts talks about how chicken farming turned his life around. I admit it: It made me a little misty.

You don’t walk away from the show with anything more than a vague impression of the size of the urban ag movement, since nothing is quantified—no figures about the volume of food that cities are producing, or how many dollars it generates, or even the zoning obstacles to turning your empty lot into a mini farm. Instead, you see Abeni Ramsey, an urban farmer and mom in West Oakland, California, say, “I think it’s a revolutionary act to plant a tomato plant in the backyard.” It’s a line Alice Waters has uttered so many times she should have trademarked it. From the lips of cool-looking, beanie-topped Ramsey, in a neighborhood that looks only slightly less ravaged than Corktown, the statement sounds fresh again.

The pilot was produced by a team that includes director Greg Roden and food writer Stett Holbrook. It's rolling out over various PBS stations in the coming weeks (check the broadcast schedule for dates). More episodes are planned for later this year.

Image source: Food Forward / Facebook

If you ever watched a grimacing Bear Grylls eat a huge roach in the Amazon rainforest and declare, “It tastes like putrid cheeeese,” then you know the voyeuristic thrill of foraging in the wild. A show debuting on BBC America this week, No Kitchen Required, gives that concept balls.

The series is a mix of Survivor, Top Chef, and The Amazing Race, with a stiff dose of the old BBC reality adventure show Last Man Standing thrown in. The premise: Three chefs drop into exotic locations around the globe, get a taste of the local food, and then set out to forage and cook out in the open. Local dignitaries judge their efforts, and host Shini Somara—a sort of brooding Padma—declares the winner.

The chefs seethe with testosterone. There’s British-born Madison Cowan, a Chopped grand champion whose job appears to be starring in TV cooking battles. Also Kayne Raymond, a Kiwi private chef (he's from Chopped, too) who looks like an extra from the movie 300, only without the leather man pants. And finally, New York chef Michael Psilakis of MP Taverna, who has a Michelin star and what Ruth Bourdain calls a chin-strap version of the scratchy soul patch (Psilakis is also the show’s co-executive producer).

In the opening minutes of tonight’s episode, set on the Caribbean island Dominica (home to the Kalinago people), the three competitors rappel down a sheer cliff face to a beach, where Somara waits to deliver their first challenge.

Cowan: “How you hangin’?”

Psilakis: “I’m hangin’ good."

It’s that kind of show—the boys' club of the modern restaurant kitchen, transported to the tropics. Fortunately, beauty shots of ocean sunsets and jungle waterfalls offer a bit of scenic relief from what would otherwise be a simple clash of the titans. And the semi-subliminal message in episode one is that victory does not always go to the swift, or the buffest. In tonight’s opening "Native Challenge" (the equivalent of a Top Chef Quickfire), which involves scrambling up a steep hill to dig yams, city boy Psilakis finds that slow and steady really does win the race.

To set up the main competition, the boys get a taste of Dominica’s Kalinago cooking at a little party thrown by some Kalinago dignitaries. It's a Caribbean cuisine built on starchy tubers, freshwater crabs and crayfish, and the manicou, a gnarly rodent that looks like a cross between a rat and a possum. By the end of the little shindig (lubricated by the local sugarcane fire water) the dudes have all picked a protein to be the star of their cooking challenge. (The guy who gets the manicou? That'd be Cowan, who's deathly scared of rats. Go figure.) Each chef hooks up with a local forager specializing in his particular creature, and the next morning they head out to hunt.

We see Raymond groping rocks in streams, feeling for crayfish, as Psilakis goes spearfishing and Cowan—by the conventions of reality TV—learns to overcome his fear of rodents.

By Act 4, the chefs are preparing to cook on a lovely red-clay beach about to be whipped by hurricane winds. Each guy comes up with a three-course menu built around his own particular ingredient. Each has been able to bring a chef’s knife and a single outside ingredient (I won’t spoil the surprise). And then it all just looks like chaos, as the wind and rain take their toll.

If you were hoping for cooking tips on manicou, you’re pretty much out of luck. Disappointingly, No Kitchen Required turns out to be just another reality drama about competition itself. Seconds after the boys have styled their dishes on slabs of wood and in rustic baskets, the focus shifts to the five-judge panel of Kalinago dignitaries, who taste not only for flavor but for how well the food, in Somara’s words, maintains “the integrity of their tradition.”

In theory, it’s like Star Trek’s Prime Directive against steamrolling native cultures. But the Kalinago judges seemed driven more by taste than by the integrity of anyone’s tradition. That's one of the show’s flaws. Though the element of cultural education saturates the show’s premise—in the nine episodes to come, the chefs will forage and simmer their way through Belize, New Zealand, Thailand, and New Mexico, among others—if the premiere episode is any guide, No Kitchen Required is more ass-kicking than anthropology.

Given that the element of competition between Cowan, Raymond, and Psilakis doesn’t seem all that interesting, that’s a shame. After all, if all we wanted to see were hunky bros throwing down, we could watch YouTube clips of American Gladiators.

No Kitchen Required airs on BBC America, Tuesdays at 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific Times, 9 p.m. Central.

Image source: From left, Kayne Raymond, Michael Psilakis, and Madison Cowan, from BBC America

Ree Drummond has a face that looks as pale and soft as biscuit dough, dimpled and a little jowly. It’s a face that never once loses its grin through entire episodes of The Pioneer Woman, Drummond’s cooking show on the Food Network. Brashly copper-haired, with eyebrows sketched into quizzical arches, the Pioneer Woman wears her smile like a shrug, one that seems to say, “To hell with being perfect.” At the same time, she’s showing you how to make perfect crème brûlée.

That’s the manufactured tension at the heart of Drummond’s show—how to make perfect food in the midst of an imperfect life. “If something doesn’t turn out just right,” the Pioneer Woman says in a promo, “I say, ‘Look, it’s rustic,’ and then I feel better.” The thing is, on her TV show, the food always manages to turn out just right.

Female viewers will identify with Drummond’s mix of dorkishness and girlish grace (“I channel Lucille Ball, Vivien Leigh, and Ethel Merman,” her Twitter profile says). A stampede of kids and animals and dust is always threatening to invade the soaring, light-filled Oklahoma lodge house (it looks a lot like a sprawling home in a high-end suburb) she shares with the silent, hunky rancher husband she calls Marlboro Man. And yet Drummond executes meals that almost anyone could make—even with the demands of laundry and homeschooling and the occasional bout of paralyzing despair—and make beautifully. The Pioneer Woman is about weaving an escapist fantasy out of the mundane strands of a woman’s life.

A lot has been written about the Pioneer Woman and her blog, which existed long before the TV show. Drummond’s first cookbook debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list (her latest, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier, has been on the list for a couple of weeks now). Also debuting there: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels: A Love Story, Drummond’s 2011 memoir about being romanced by her chaps-wearing husband, Ladd, and moving from LA to Oklahoma. The New Yorker has profiled her. She has nearly 300,000 Twitter followers and more than 400,000 likes on Facebook. Her website gets 20 million hits a month. Drummond is a megabrand.

But if some Saturday morning you just clicked onto The Pioneer Woman on TV, not knowing Drummond’s net worth, you might not guess she draws Martha-size audience share. The episodes on season two of the show—through pacing, visual styling, and the narratives that play out over the course of 30 minutes—reinforce Drummond’s branding, which is to say they seem totally authentic. “I live on a ranch in the middle of nowhere,” Drummond says in voice-over as the show starts, “and I’ve got a lot of mouths to feed.” It’s a tag line soaked in relationship marketing, for women who feel overwhelmed with everything that’s on their plate. This is masterful food TV.

A recent episode, "Triple Act," found Drummond getting ready for the arrival of her mom, Gee, and sister Betsy for a girls’ weekend. The Pioneer Woman asks a lot of open-ended questions. “What is it about scallops? They’re so wonderful.” Or, “What is it about moms and daughters getting together that never gets old?” The questions reinforce Drummond’s bond with viewers, even as they carry the force of philosophical musings.

A softly grinning Drummond preps crème brûlée in anticipation of the family reunion. “This is the happiest day of my life,” she says, and you believe her, just like you believe in the food she’s making. “I don’t know what I’m more excited about,” she pivots to confess, ladling custard into ramekins. “My mom and Betsy visiting or crème brûlée. Maybe both.” Bam! In one stroke, Drummond has closed the sale, injecting her recipe with a meaning deeper than mere taste.

And when it comes time to eat that crème brûlée (after a lunch of pasta and seafood baked in foil), instead of letting Mom and Betsy and Drummond’s two teen daughters have their own ramekins, the Pioneer Woman does something subtle but brilliant. She sets all the ramekins on a tray in the middle of the enormous farmhouse table, and lets everybody dig in communally with spoons: female bonding over dessert, played out visually.

Next day, by the end of a Sunday lunch consisting of the kind of warm spinach salad that’s on the menu at a Nordstrom department store café, and Gee and Betsy are packing up to go home, Drummond turns her soft-mouthed little smile to the camera. “This is a triumph,” she says. You have to think she means it.

The Pioneer Woman airs Saturdays on the Food Network, 10 a.m. Eastern and Pacific Time, 9 a.m. Central.

Image source: FoodNetwork.com

You look at Ron Ben-Israel and think: Seriously? The host of the Food Network's pastry competition show Sweet Genius is like a composite of Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. He's part Dr. Evil superciliousness, part Church Lady simper: head shaved, eyebrows plucked into a perennial "Oh, reeaally?" He perches on a stool above the set’s centerpiece tasting counter with the twee poise of Pee-wee Herman on his bike. He samples contestants’ soufflé cakes and marshmallow fluff through thin, moist lips, like a hummingbird sipping nectar. And at the end of each challenge, he delivers his signature send-home line to the failed contestant in an accent that sounds made up.

And then it hits you: Ben-Israel and his show, which launched its second season last night on the Food Network, are seriously brilliant.

Each hourlong episode has a familiar rhythm: Four contestants (pastry chefs and other professional sweets makers) vie in three dessert challenges. At the end of the show, Ben-Israel crowns one of them a "sweet genius," an honor that comes with a $10,000 purse. Being a genius means not only demonstrating talent with a stand mixer and a pastry bag, but also the ability to take oddball challenges in stride.

The elimination challenges involve making a particular kind of dessert using a mandatory ingredient and a single source of inspiration, all revealed on a conveyor-belt runway. In the case of last night's episode, this translated into making a chocolate dessert incorporating strawberry Pop-Tarts (or, in Ben-Israel-speak, “toaster pastries filled with jaaaaaam”) inspired by a goldfish. (I am not making this up.) And like all cooking competition shows, there was the twist: Halfway through the contestants' fevered prep, Ben-Israel—his eyes sparkling through artsy eyewear—threw in a second surprise ingredient, pumpkin seeds.

Frankly, the four contestants’ creations looked mediocre. Oddly, that makes the show likable. Unlike on Top Chef, where the food is often so well-made it leaves me feeling awed and helpless, the desserts here look doable, albeit tarted up with spun sugar and chocolate bark. And it turns out that Ben-Israel is a benevolent Willy Wonka, not a vengeful one. Hear him tell one contestant at the judging table that he could have done better—“Genius is not a whisper, it’s a ROAR!”—and it occurs to you that the advice could apply to life, not just profiterole batter.

Let’s face it, cook show competitions are so formulaic that even the best ones can have your thumb feeling for the fast-forward button. A series like Top Chef: Just Desserts relies so much on story lines of competitor conflict it can end up feeling scripted. But Sweet Genius director Michael Pearlman and the show’s producers are smart enough to match the look and pacing to SG's flamboyant host. Which is probably why Sweet Genius stands alone in the Food Network roster as a series with a flash of Project Runway brilliance. The producers let Ben-Israel be himself, the way the producers of the Bravo fashion show let Tim Gunn be Tim Gunn. This is food TV that roars.

Sweet Genius airs Thursdays on the Food Network at 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific Time, 9 p.m. Central.

Image source: Food Network