Gordon Ramsay Is the Last of a Dying Breed of Reality TV Hosts

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Even when he's not trying to be, Gordon Ramsay is a terrifying person. His culinary talents are well established, but the intensity he brings to his cooking and restaurant ventures has been his calling card since he was featured in the 1999 British documentary Boiling Point. In 2005, Ramsay landed on American television with Hell's Kitchen, a cooking competition series whose signature obstacle was this ranting madman getting up in a contestant's face, telling them their dish was a dead donkey. He's since launched nearly a dozen shows in the States, seven of which are currently still in production.

Over the years, on shows like Kitchen Nightmares, Master Chef, and Master Chef Junior, Ramsay has shown an ability to modulate his levels of terror (he's actually quite lovely in his interactions with the little junior Master Chefs.) Next Level Chef, the cooking competition show he hosts along with judges Richard Blais and Nyesha Arrington, features a comparatively more mellow Ramsay than the one in Hell's Kitchen or Kitchen Nightmares. But he’s still just as capable of turning an up-and-coming chef to stone with a word. In the opening montage of the Season 3 premiere, that word is "FOCUS!" We don't see to whom he says it, nor the context, but it's a reminder that no one on reality TV commands authority quite like Gordon Ramsay.

Ramsay arrived on the scene as part of a wave of Stern British Taskmasters on reality television. For a while there, we absolutely couldn't get enough of them. It all started when Simon Cowell was coaxed across the Atlantic from Britian's Pop Idol to be the lead judge on American Idol. It's easy to forget, given what a circus that judging panel would become over the years, how task-oriented Cowell was in those early years. He was there to help winnow down the pool of contestants to only the few who could make money as a pop star, and he was utterly pitiless in his assessments of everyone who couldn't.

The famous dust-up between Cowell and Randy Jackson began because Cowell was fed up with the American audience giving subpar singers enough sympathy votes to advance to the next round. For Cowell, there was no room for sympathy in a talent competition: a contestsant had the goods or they didn't.

Cowell's pitiless talent assessment may not have been shared by his fellow Idol judges, but it definitely was by the wave of British reality-show personalities who followed in his footsteps. NBC brought The Weakest Link over to the States along with its host, Ann Robinson. Like Cowell, Robinson dressed all in black and was not shy about sharing her displeasure with contestants' shortcomings. The Weakest Link was trivia for people who like to be dominated, as round-after-round, contestants were berated for their wrong answers.

Other stern Brits followed. Many were, like Cowell and Robinson, British imports. Who could forget Supernanny, which premiered on ABC about five months prior to Hell's Kitchen, featuring Jo Frost as the titular child-care expert who gets called in to help parents with unruly children? Frost wasn't nearly as mean as Cowell or Robinson were, but her solutions were most frequently some version of advising the parents to better discipline their kids and structure their lives. Marry Poppins with a time-out chair, in other words.

And while she wasn't British but rather Australian, Bravo's Tabatha Coffey absolutely fit this template. Coffey pretty much fell into Bravo producers' laps after she popped on the short-lived haircutting competition series Shear Genius. Coffey's blunt assessments of her competitors gave Bravo producers the idea to put her on a show where she shows up at failing hair salons and whips them into shape.

What exactly was it about British taskmaster-types in the aughts that American audiences craved so? It might have been some kind of post-colonial parental vibe between Americans and Brits: “Mummy and Daddy have come back home to yell at you for not living up to your potential.” At the time when The Weakest Link debuted, Ann Robinson drew comparisons to Margaret Thatcher, so maybe it was a conservative thing. But when Gordon Ramsay debuted with Hell's Kitchen, it all made sense. He was like a culinary Jason Statham with blond hair and a network censor who had to file for overtime pay.

The paces that Ramsay put the Hell's Kitchen contestants through were like a boot camp, and he was the drill sergeant. Yet that English accent was a reminder that rather than training for war, these contestants were after something more refined. They were crawling through mud and insults to get there, but at the other end, Ramsay was going to make a chef out of them.

As with most reality TV fads, the Stern British Taskmaster faded in popularity over time. Supernanny is no more. The Weakest Link was rebooted with American host Jane Lynch, who tries her best to make the contestants feel bad after every round, but it's not the same. Simon Cowell left American Idol, failed to recapture the magic with The X-Factor, and is now stuck judging contortionists and child singers on America's Got Talent. (Imagine the 2002 version of Simon Cowell saying anything remotely approaching the phrase "America's got talent.") The Brits even have a series called Taskmaster where host Greg Davies is very much not a stern taskmaster. The culture has drifted on.

Gordon Ramsay is the last of a dying breed. With his FIVE in-production TV series, at least two of which still feature him in prime "chef from a Guy Ritchie movie" mode, he's as omnipresent on network TV as Dick Wolf. He can still make your blood run cold with a single stern command. And even if on Next Level Chef he keeps his rage on a low simmer and mostly uses it to knock Richard Blais down a peg every now and then, there's still nobody who can terrorize a kitchen quite like him.

Next Level Chef Season 3 premieres January 28 at 10:00 PM ET on Fox, before moving to its Thursday 8:00 PM ET time slot on February 1. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.