Too Few Jokes in the Kitchen
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
How do you distill a wonderful book into 100 half-hours of television? That’s the dilemma that faces Darren Star, the creator of “Sex and the City,” as he dares to deconstruct Anthony Bourdain’s hilarious “Restaurant Confidential” into a sitcom – and based on the pilot, he’s got a struggle on his hands. There’s a lot to root for in this Fox half hour, most notably the charismatic performance of Bradley Cooper as the egomaniacal chef about to open his latest chic New York boite. But the predictable setups and stale jokes that have come to dominate the network sitcom format overwhelm the clever aspects of the “Kitchen Confidential” pilot, co-written by Mr. Star and Dave Hemingson (an alumnus of the late, unlamented NBC comedy “Just Shoot Me”). Their dependence on sitcom “clams” – those painfully overused rhythms and punch lines you’ve heard a million times before – diminishes the true comedy of Mr. Bourdain’s book.
It’s too bad, because this show should work. Mr. Star has repeatedly proven himself a shrewd calculator of the American zeitgeist – from his smash 1990 debut as the creator of teen sudser “Beverly Hills 90210” to the trash classics “Melrose Place” and “Central Park West” to HBO’s signature series “Sex and the City” – and “Kitchen Confidential” fits squarely into America’s recent obsession with celebrity chefs and haute cuisine. Mr. Bourdain’s book topped best-seller lists for months; its tasty insights into the backstage, backstabbing world of swanky restaurants lent itself naturally to a Hollywood adaptation. For a while, Brad Pitt had been attached to a possible movie version; the shift to television didn’t bode well for its future, and the results suggest that a movie might have better served a layered portrait of the dashing Mr. Bourdain.
Instead, the backstory of Jack Bourdain’s life – his first name has been inexplicably changed here – gets short shrift in favor of a shaggy hound-dog story that doesn’t really work. We’re told, way too quickly, that Mr. Bourdain has been suddenly saved from his days as a boozing womanizer by the owner of a new restaurant in need of a chef to open its doors that night. Within minutes Jack has donned his apron and restored his arrogance, using insults and bravado to force his employees to adopt his way of cooking. Everything happens too fast: the conflicts, the sex, even the arrival of the New York Times restaurant critic, who shows up on opening night – and, of course, turns out to have once slept with Jack. The crescendo of coincidences keeps getting in the way of what could have been a clever pilot premise.
The same goes for the plotlines planned for future episodes; there’s the intimation of a future conflict over Jack’s affections between the beautiful daughter of the restaurant’s owner and his former girlfriend – a generic-seeming scenario for a show about a chef. Why not play with the subject more? There must be better stories to steal from Mr. Bourdain’s highly anecdotal (if R-rated) narrative. Too much of “Kitchen Confidential” plays to the cheap seats; when Jack gathers his staff together for the obligatory you’re-all-a-bunch-of-screwups speech, it seems forced – especially given the soft-spoken charms of Bradley Cooper. (Audiences may recognize Mr. Cooper from his snarly performance as the boyfriend Sack Lodge in this summer’s “Wedding Crashers.”)
There’s still plenty of time for Mr. Star to fix this show; its 8:30 p.m. time slot on Monday nights pits it against some vulnerable competition, including CBS’s disappointing new series, “How I Met Your Mother.” Over the course of his venerable career, Mr. Star has demonstrated an uncanny skill at shifting characters and stories to build a following for shows with shaky ratings; he knows how to listen and learn, two skills sorely lacking among most Hollywood writer-producers. In the case of “Kitchen Confidential,” he need only return to the core premise of the book he bought and restore its randy, brilliant central character. If this show were based on the true, wild life of Anthony Bourdain – and not the phony, sitcom world of Jack – it would have a far better chance of becoming the hit show it deserves to be.
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The scariest thing about “How I Met Your Mother,” the new romantic comedy on CBS, is its presumption that when we look back on 2005 a quarter century from now, it will still look like a multi-camera sitcom with a laugh track and sex jokes. It might have been interesting if this show had made something more of its premise of a man looking back on the buildup to his marriage – it’s a rich idea that could prompt all sorts of cosmic reflections on love and fate. But based on the pilot, it seems that the show’s creators, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas (who hail from “Late Night With David Letterman”), have chosen the safer road; they stuck with the staples of sitcom writing and delivered a pilot that feels like every other urban dating show on television. This seems to be the season for conceptual gimmicks, and there’s nothing wrong with that – but in the end, the jokes still have to be funny. Maybe when these writers become more comfortable in the format they’ve devised, they’ll start playing more with their interesting premise and make their show worth watching.