Totale

That's the $64,000 question. On the one hand they've been so sloppy about vetting in the past that it would be hard to believe they could be so naive as to let it happen again, and especially to let it get all the way to the final. They've got the Internet, and I'll bet even for them it's at 20th century levels, how could they miss it? On the other hand they've been so sloppy about vetting in the past that it's completely believable they could be so naive as to let it happen again, and be stone blind to it and let it get all the way to the final, so... Somebody there liked him and thought his act was cute, they had him on Throwdown and Chopped before FNS. I think they intended to make him happen Fierri-style and unfortunately for them the public reacted differently then his champions there did.

Nope, they keep the cash. I think they ran out of people willing to play these games for charities.

Watching this offscreen trainwreck is far more delicious than anything I've seen on the show.

I thought nobody hated Blais more than I did. But it looks like regardless of what the top end of production thinks the editors were having a great time making him look stupid, and between her comments and votes maybe Gail has had it up to here with his act, too. And speaking of Gail, I'll jump in the shallow end and say she looked great on this show. You go, girl.

Wow. I'll bet Top Chef could use a story like that. Wonder if they'll steal it?

I believe that to the depths of my funky soul. But in past years they've gotten to the final with people who wouldn't have been thrown out into the street if they showed up with their FNS big final production as their initial demo reel. These final three were so bad that they would never have squeezed a foot in the door without FNS to prop them up. I'm disappointed that they apparently didn't try to come up with anyone this year that it's vaguely conceivable they'd award more than a pity show to at the end.

She should have just added Creole seasoning and said "And two tablespoons of Creole seasoning. There are a million recipes for Creole seasoning, which are all slight variations on the same ingredients - you can buy it premade or you can make your own. My favorite is Emeril's version and you can find his recipe on foodnetwork.com."

You'll all wish you hadn't, you know. Brain bleach is expensive.

I forget if it was in a flash cut or during his raw takes, but somewhere in there Lenny took a taste off of a wooden spoon and stuck it back in the pan. I heard Luca say his show was going to be based on "my mother's bad recipes". Nicole looked stupid drinking out of the bottle, mugging and spilling shit all over. This is the best they could do?

That's more credit than I would give them.

I'm pretty sure that no matter what happens you won't be reading about any of it. Between NDAs and Lenny undoubtedly having signed away all rights to his existence as a prerequisite to being on this show, if he breathes a word they'll whip him like a dogie, take away his belt buckle and napkin ring, and send him back to the corral with his tail between his legs.

Jeez, not that I pay that much attention, but I thought Smith's deal was that after Red State he was going to make one more movie, about hockey, then hang it up. Since I was never going to be in the least interested in the hockey movie I figured his career was done. Clerks III sounds like a horrible idea.

And i didn't see that season, but wasn't somebody kicked out halfway through an earlier season of this show, too? The Hell with being the Next Food Network Star, there'a an open spot in the Chelsea Market building for the Next Researcher With Minimal Google-Fu just waiting for somebody to grab it.

It's not like they bring in Price-Waterhouse to count the votes and deliver them in a sealed envelope on Graduation Night - TPTB control who "wins" no matter how the public "votes". They're not going to let the public decide how they spend their money. I think a more interesting question is whether as someone said above they knew about all this and it never mattered because Lenny was just here to be a FNS character, or if they really were so sloppy as to miss these publicly available embarrassments. The "winner" is going to have to come to NYC for a month to shoot their prize show and possibly for more. People do have life commitments and it's not that easy to rearrange things, and the FN production staff needs time to write the recipes and scripts, all of which would argue for the "winner's" contracts being all signed and settled before FNS shooting even starts. If they really were so cluefree as to miss Lenny's past and he was the intended winner, they probably wrote in a morals or marketability clause or something good enough to get them out of it, but now they'll have to scramble to get Plan B up and running.

Well, as far as the writers can see it works on the TV audience, so why not?

I swear like a sailor's evil mother, myself. But was "oh, shit!" really better than "oh, no!" there? I think the latter, delivered right, could even have been funnier. Opinions can vary, of course.

Haven't they been running the same time as "Walking Dead" so far? I would imagine if it's coming back it will when WD does.

I can't agree. I think they've started laying on the "Oh, look, it's HBO, we can say fuck and shit" so hard that just like my Mom warned me it would it loses all of its power.

I thought when she went in to see the contestants she was just whispering to save her voice for the Big Show. She probably whispers 23 hours out of the day now.

On a real FN show they would have fixed that, and put ketchup on the kid's portion and "grown-up" ketchup on Mom and Dad's. She's attractive and can speak standard English and be understood which should put her above the other three. But I think her problem here is not that she's too cosmopolitan, but that seafood, even in coastal America, is not hick food. It's not readily available fresh in large swaths of the country, and it's expensive. The few hours FN does grudgingly devote to actual cooking each week are overwhelmingly devoted to chow, not cuisine. Maybe they've decided to change that up, but "go with the tried and true" seems more likely.

I do believe he got that notion from Nina, who if I remember correctly said something very similar last year. And she should presumably know better.

Yeah, I thought they wished her into the cornfield. Me too. Everything up to the end of the opening sequence kills about five minutes. After the first challenge I skip to the beginning of that night's service because I don't care about the reward or the punishment or the contestant's personalities. Then after service I skip through the deliberations because they're superfluous to Grrr deciding who is going home, anyway. With commercials gone too I've usually got it down to 30-35 minutes.

I made it about a minute and a half. I have to accept (given Fieri) that there's an audience who want "up" people on TV shouting at them. I want people on TV smarter than I am telling me something I don't already know, and if it's an instructional program giving me hope that I could do it too, if I want to and will apply myself.

I think you have this right. All the time (and quite rightly, too) I read people saying "I'd never watch a show with PieHole/Butcheress/Penny/Lenny/(name your hatee)", when in fact that's exactly what they (and I) are doing. And TPTB know this - this show is this show and it's a hit for them. When they get people like that, I don't think they hire them through this process. Or maybe in Mauro and Demaris's case, they hire them and ask them to go through the gauntlet for the good of the team.

Not good at names, but there was a girl on Top Chef who served up a Flintstones chop like that a couple of years back and got roundly shot down and I think eliminated for it. Their scriptwriters fooled me - two of my picks for top 3 are now out. At this point I can see more reasons why they wouldn't pick any of the remaining contestants than why they would - Rodeo Clown, Wut Wut and Pageant Girl should be obvious, Luka is nice and can cook but can't talk, and it sounds like damning with faint praise but I still think Nicole is probably too pretty for FN's predominantly female middle American audience.