Sickeningly sweet

Gordon Ramsay’s television career has been a fascinating one to chart. He seems to be succeeding at failing upwards because while each successive show has been getting more and more viewers, it’s all been downhill quality-wise since The F Word.

MasterChef, in particular, is a weird one. Ramsay’s persona is all about his coarse, fiery anger yet here he seems to have relegated the role of pissed-off judge to the infinitely less capable Joe Bastianich. Ramsay sits somewhere between big ole teddy bear judge Graham Elliot and Bastianich as the jocular, reasonable one, with only the restaurant episodes providing a glimpse of his vulgar side.

Unfortunately for you lovers of spectacle and sadism, MasterChef Junior, if the premiere is any indication, wears kid gloves the whole time. Even Bastianich’s faux-mirthless facade seems more forced than usual. In fact, he seems to die a little inside every time the producers tell him to lavish praise on a pile of slop.

It’s a jarring shift to see everyone, and I mean everyone, get so much praise. The phrase “restaurant quality” had already lost any meaning after four seasons of grown-up MasterChef, but here? You’d think these kids just opened The French Laundry or something.

The camera, on the other hand, is far less kind. None of these kids is particularly adept at plating, and the lighting is anything but flattering. Most of the dishes look gloopy. The lucky ones look barely passable.

Since all the food looks about the same and all of the judges are so gosh darn complimentary, figuring out who’s actually on top becomes a difficult analytical game. Her cake looks good, but Ramsay didn’t call it the best cake ever on MasterChef, so she must be out!

Whatever you do, don’t watch MasterChef Junior by yourself. Find someone – anyone – to watch this show with or else you’ll go insane from boredom. You’ll become so bored that your children will have beige hair.

The more entertaining hallmarks of the old grown-up MasterChef are barely there. The production is so cheap that I almost thought the camera crew just kidnapped some kids and were holding them hostage on the MasterChef set. The camera never leaves the set – nor does it in the preview for next episode – and the curtains and demonstration foods all look terribly cheap.

Sadly, the hyperactive editing team all took massive amounts of downers since the finale of MasterChef. That means no more drawn-out eliminations from Ramsay, where some over-caffeinated prick strings together quintuple negatives to draw out the process. Here, it’s plainly obvious when someone’s time has come, though why someone’s leaving remains pretty arbitrary.

It’s a little disappointing to see how generic the audition episode is. Typically, MasterChef goes for the patented American Idol mix of complete lunatics with colorful stories and actually decent cooks.

In MasterChef Junior, the contestants don’t get to pick what type of dish they’re cooking. No one makes something so out-of-the-box insane as beaver pasta or mindnumbingly awful as “seafood chowder.” Your mind won’t touch the void.

For the most part, it’s just adequately executed comfort food made by a batch of adequately cute 9- to 12-year-olds. Another fun game to play involves figuring what each kid’s going to grow up to be.

I’m betting that Kaylen comes back 30 years later on vanilla MasterChef as a sassy black home cook. Nathan’s totally going to become a stoner. Poor little Jack will grow up to be a Wes Anderson protagonist.

The parents might just be the most interesting part of the whole show. It’s unreasonable to expect them to show up every episode, but I’m hoping to see glimpses of how each parent interacts with their kids, for better and worse.

The sight of a beaming dad’s smile turn into an icy cold death stare after his son loses beats Ramsay talking about a 13-year-old girl’s love life any day.