There’s a wonderful show on the BBC called “Ready, Steady, Cook!” that for some reason hasn’t yet been imported to the Food Network, or homogenized by NBC for American consumption. But it’s better than anything I’ve ever seen on the Food Network, including this Sunday’s debut of “Iron Chef America.” What makes “Ready, Steady Cook!” so wonderfully different from the phoniness of the “Iron Chef” concept is its use of normal people and everyday ingredients in a battle for the prize. The host – an elegant, bald, black Englishman named Ainsley Harriott – plucks ordinary chefs from the audience, not celebrities. He then watches benignly as they figure out a way to utilize ingredients (bought from a neighborhood supermarket and delivered to the set in a crinkly brown grocery bag) to make the most delicious dish possible in a matter of minutes. It’s funny, exciting, and real – all elements that seem sadly lacking in “Iron Chef America.”

There’s no point in attempting to dissuade devoted foodies from watching “Iron Chef America.” It has long since become a fact of life that the television-watching audience loves seeing the world’s most famous chefs take each other on in a cooking arena under hot lights, with camera operators running frantically to keep up with the cooks and helpers as they flail about with knives and spoons, sauce pans and cutting boards. It’s a ludicrous invention that caught on during the first wave of reality television, when “Survivor” and “Big Brother” were novelties, and critics looked down their noses at their existence. These days you’re more likely to find a full-length review of a Fox reality show in the New York Times than one of a Masterpiece Theater miniseries.

But four years after the debut of “Iron Chef” on the Food Network, the only real surprise is that it took so long for them to turn it into an American series. Debuting this Sunday at 9 p.m., it stands little chance of dominating a timeslot saturated with successful dramas like “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “Desperate Housewives.” (It may at least draw a few disappointed viewers away from season two of HBO’s “Carnivale.”) The Food Network has always struck me as being several steps behind the culture; while it celebrates the notion of chef-as-guru, it fails to find new faces and instead depends on those already established elsewhere as celebrities.

Chief among those who’ve dominated the Food Network schedule – to its detriment – is Bobby Flay, who turns up here in the first segment of “Iron Chef America” only days after the debut of “Wickedly Perfect,” the CBS reality show about cooking and style that counts Mr. Flay among its team of celebrity judges. I’ve always admired Mr. Flay’s sense of style and bravado; “Boy Meets Grill” was an inspired name for a cookbook, and his commitment to American southwest cuisine established a niche that only underscored his fame. Here, Flay takes on Rick Bayless, who owns the Frontrera Grill in Chicago, and whose own stature has grown with his success as America’s most dominant practitioner of Mexican cuisine.

But watching these two larger-than-life chefs face off over slabs of buffalo meat turns out to be a dull exercise that barely sustains itself over 60 minutes. There’s no witty repartee over the saucepans, among the judges (who include, inexplicably, Julie Chen of the CBS Early Show), or from the show’s earnest commentators, Kevin Brauch (doing play-by-play) and Alton Brown. The use of sports-broadcasting concepts like instant replay and analysis fall flat, as the chefs proceed through the steps of preparing and cooking without much regard for those in the audience who might not possess a six burner Viking stove. This is not a show for the weak of wallet.

Maybe that’s why I like “Ready, Steady, Cook” so much – it’s an egalitarian concept that anyone can relate to. How do you make something out of nothing? That’s the challenge of “Ready, Steady, Cook,” and of our everyday lives as we cram our cooking fantasies into tiny blocks of time and cramped kitchen quarters. It’s not entertaining to watch fancy chefs in mammoth kitchens, making gourmet meals we can’t afford – it’s just annoying.

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There’s something almost tragic about watching “Joey” as its spirals downward in quality this season. Its storylines continue to diminish the character as originally created on “Friends” – he’s been reduced to playing a brain-dead sex maniac who eats large helpings of lasagna. You can almost see the pain in Matt LeBlanc’s face as he goes through the motions of his character, masking the misery he must feel in keeping Joey Tribbiani alive. Unlike Frasier Crane, there’s no new dimension to his character that justifies its longevity; “Joey” writers endlessly repeat the same joke in different contexts, and waste the considerable comic talents of Drea de Matteo.

The merciless milking of “Joey” by NBC demonstrates the cruel realities of network economics; unlike the BBC, where a show like “The Office” can run for two stellar seasons and then disappear, “Joey” will have to last for at least five seasons to justify this madness. The greed that fuels the networks’ addiction to stale concepts – I count “24” among those shows that should have been cancelled by now, but are propped up by critics who watch too much television – is what crowds good shows off the airwaves, and keeps junk like “Joey” around.