What I’m Watching

Now that Game of Thrones is on a break — and I don’t have to constantly marvel (read: talk endlessly) about how fantastic it is — I have a gaping hole at “favorite show on TV.” If you casually mention this quandary in a conversation, you’ll get a lot of advice. Probably more than you want. People love to push their favorite shows. Often feel compelled to do so. So I’ve heard many arguments, most involving the new benchmark shows on cable, like Homeland (truly excellent, and filmed in Charlotte — woot!), Breaking Bad (just slightly overrated, but still very, very good), The Walking Dead (became an absolute train-wreck last season — leave the damn farm! — but vastly improved in season three), and, of course, Mad Men (solid, but not really “appointment TV” in my book). I will also listen to arguments for Bones (family pressure, and yes, it’s very good), New Girl (that cast just kills it), and Go, Diego, Go (this one is mainly pushed by my two-year-old son). But none of those shows really hit the mark. Neither do my two reality TV favorites The Amazing Race (one day I will run it, mark my words) and Survivor (still the purest reality competition of them all).

So, having given this some serious thought, I’ve come down to an answer, and it shocked me: right now, my favorite show on TV is Chopped. I watch it maybe five times a week. It’s the first show I pull off my DVR. I love that the food baskets are always absurd (“gummy worms, oak tree bark!”), that the judges are delightfully smug for a group of people no one’s ever heard of, and that the chefs like to give fancy names to finished dishes that look remarkably like Mac-and-Cheese. The show demands very little of me — I can miss twenty minutes to change of a diaper, or rescue my dog from a vicious cat attack, and still be up to speed. Plus it’s about food, which, for some reason, is a genre of reality show I can’t get enough of despite almost never cooking anything myself, and knowing that, intrinsically, I can’t really know who won, because I don’t get to taste anything But I still tune in. Man v. Food, Top Chef, Great Food Truck Race. I watch them all. I even watched the entire run of Extreme Chef, which was just terrible.

Look, I want to say my favorite show is Boardwalk Empire, or Downton Abbey, or something classy and highbrow. But this is my blog, and here we tell the truth. And the truth is, my current favorite TV show is an elimination cooking competition for $10,000, where contestants get browbeaten by haughty strangers and sometimes cut their fingers badly. It is what it is.

On second thought, Downton Abbey is way better. The Dowager Countess. Straight baller.