'Hell's Kitchen': 'Survivor' Meets 'The Apprentice'

It seems it's about time the British showed the US how to make a successful reality show. Enter 'Hell's Kitchen', a TV show so controversial that even the fact that it makes the viewers positively loathe it stands as argument that it is really that good. After all, you know what they say, if they hate you, that means they care.

Gordon Ramsay, ex-pro soccer player turned chef, is the mastermind that rules in the restaurant/show set 'Hell's Kitchen'. Before coming on FOX with his ground-breaking reality show, he had a lot of success back home, in the UK, with 'Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares' and 'The F Word'.

Basically, the show is about two teams of wannabes cooks that must, in very short time, shop for groceries and cook a meal for the diners who dare to step in the above-mentioned restaurant. One by one, the contestants are cast aside (not without being utterly humiliated first) or made to turn against each other, in their desperate attempts to please the devilish chef.

There are many that say that this is not a show about cooking or about how to become a professional chef. It's about the contestants getting their hands on the $1 million-restaurant in Los Angeles. It's about learning how not to respond to criticism and bad words. It's, as we have said in the title, a show half distance between 'Survivor' and Trump's 'The Apprentice'.

But, despite being that disliked and controversial to many, the show has one great merit: it proves that Englishmen do not always correspond to usual the polite and uptight stereotype. 'The typical British stereotype is of someone who is very cultured and polite. These people are the reverse of that, and part of the reason being obnoxious works is because it goes against expectations', said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television.