But if I were into them, there’d be plenty of choices: “Top Chef Junio,” “Chopped Junior,” “Master Chef Junior,” “Kids Baking Championship.” Kids as young as 8 years of age appear on these shows.
On “Top Chef Junior,” which debuted in October and ends in February, competitors ages 11 to 14 appear to have internalized the adult manners of the reality TV “cheftestant”—paring down their stories into screen-ready morsels, taking cleansing breaths during emotional interviews and infusing their dishes with personal meaning. (One contestant dedicates her dessert to a deceased Girl Scout troop leader.) Some contestants already have the beginnings of branded websites, including one with a currently empty section labeled “merch.” (Source: WSJ – subscription required)
Branded websites? Never too young to start building your brand, differentiating yourself from all those boring, nothing eight-year-old kids who just want to play with their Legos and American Girl dolls. Never too young to think about capitalizing on your brand and start pushing “merch” on the 2-11 year old demographic in your audience.
It’s not like there weren’t child celebrities when I was a kid. We had them, and they were called Mouseketeers. There were certainly some brands among them that were more powerful than others. Annette Funicello’s brand sure trumped that of Darlene GIllespie. But these glamor kids were, for the most part, collectively branded. Sure, there was plenty of gear you could by. Disney-as-marketing-genius is nothing new. But I don’t remember any of it being specific to any one kid. (Maybe there were Annette paper dolls or something along those lines.But there wasn’t much. Branded “stuff” was around a show which, as often as not, featured an adult. Thus the Davey Crockett “merch.” The kickin’ Roy Rogers slippers I had. The only kid brand I can think of belonged to Shirley Temple, and her brand was first built in the 1930’s and was later resurrected, via a kids show she hosted and via Shirley Temple dolls, in the late1950’s early 1960’s.
Anyway, I find all this commercialization of children pretty distasteful, that’s for sure.
But what the pint-sized chefs are most valued for is their tears, which the cameras apparently love even more than they love a kid talking about plating his panko-encrusted salmon.
“We didn’t want to pretend that the kids didn’t cry—to me it kind of honored their process,” says Dan Cutforth, an executive producer of “Top Chef Junior.” The first episode featured two other visibly upset children. When it came to crying footage, Mr. Cutforth says, “we kept more than we cut.”
“Honored their process.” If that’s not a mouthful of unplated hokum, I don’t know what is.
The fact that the kid cooking shows keep “an on-set psychologist” around pretty much tells us all we need to know about what’s going on with these programs.
And that is that someone’s exchanging the emotional well-being of kids for ratings.Forget all this about kids being resilient. They absolutely are. But they’re also fragile, not in perfect command of their emotions, and subject to bullying – because for each classmate who’s proud to know someone who appeared on TV, there are likely a couple of dozen who want to make fun of that kid who knows how to plank a slab of panko-encrusted salmon. And for every mini toke-wearer, there are millions of strangers “out there” willing to make fun of them.
And let’s not forget that those clips of kids losing it on TV – especially if the kid is a little nerdy, goofy, or chunky – will live on to infinity and beyond, feeding the insatiable and cruel maw of the anonymous commentariat.
There’s a classic Honeymooners episode in which Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton, in one of their famous ‘get-rich-quick-schemes’ buy a load of kitchen gadgets and decide to promote it by making a TV ad for it – in which they starred. The most memorable line is when one of the boys asks the other about the gadget, which is called the Chef of the Future. The question in question: “But can it core a apple?” The answer is, of course, that “Yes, it can core a apple.” Unfortunately, it can’t core a apple without demolishing said apple.
And thus it will likely go with the little Chefs of the Futures who are today starring in all those “reality” competitions. Yes, these kids may know how to plate a dish. And they can probably do a ton of relatively pedestrian kitchen tasks, like coring a apple. But I can’t help but think that these kid chef shows, in hustling these kiddos into reality stardom, are demolishing a number of these shiny little apples in the process.
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