Meta-gaming Strategies and Marriage Equality in Bravo’s Top Chef Franchise

The Emmy-winning television cooking competition Top Chef has become a tremendously profitable franchise for the Bravo cable network, not only securing high-profile corporate sponsors willing to pay out the grand prize to the winning “cheftestant” in exchange for ubiquitous product placement and promotion, but also spawning multiple spin-offs and satellite series such as Top Chef Masters, Top Chef: Just Desserts, and this summer’s newest, Around the World in 80 Plates. In addition to the usual types of endorsement deals, which include cookbooks, cook-ware, and branded clothing, the network and franchise have ventured into two unlikely virtual spaces: video games, with Top Chef: The Game, and online education, through its Top Chef University. The aggressive editing of the raw footage into conventional story arcs is one of the distinguishing characteristics of this brand of cooking competition, a factor that guarantees its continuing popularity even among viewers who do not know how to turn on their own ovens, as Michael Pollan so eloquently pointed out in a 2009 article for the New York Times. While it is undoubtedly one of the marquee names in the network’s successful lineup of reality programming, Top Chef is at its most basic level a cooking competition more than a lifestyle show. Thus, I would like to first analyze how the various incarnations of the Top Chef cooking shows function as multiplayer games, with a clear set of rules, judging criteria, and periodic eliminations, and then consider how individual contestants periodically engage in meta-gaming by bringing in information or beliefs extraneous to the game and using these to challenge the explicit rules of the cooking competition.

I borrow the concept of meta-gaming from the critical scholarship on Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) because the online presence Bravo has deliberately fostered around the Top Chef franchise shows has striking parallels to the active strategy-sharing typical of online gaming communities. However, rather than focusing on positive meta-gaming strategies, those in which players draw upon information, skills, or strategies developed outside of the game to help them succeed at cooking-related tasks, this essay will consider instances in which the contestants feel personally compromised by an aspect of the game that asks them to choose between their personal and professional identities at the cost of maintaining the integrity of one or the other. I will call these incidents “self-defeating meta-gaming strategies” because they lead the contestants to play the game by a different set of rules than the ones upon which all the players originally agreed. This violation of the social contract implicit within the game results in a player’s lackluster culinary performance, even as it may enhance his or her credibility outside the world of the game as an advocate for a particular cause she or he espouses. The ethical dilemmas caused by a player’s decision to engage in self-defeating meta-gaming strategies during the series episodes described below demand an official reaffirmation of the rules of the game as a normative practice that restores order to the otherwise arbitrary world of the game. Thus, the judges of the Top Chef franchise end up functioning not only as the arbiters of good taste and gastronomic sophistication but also as the agents of a professional normativity that is at times stifling in its orthodoxy.

My analysis of the game aspect of this television franchise focuses primarily on two specific and somewhat controversial instances of meta-gaming in the sixth season of the original Top Chef, which is set in Las Vegas and features up-and-coming chefs battling each other for a considerable payout, and the third season of Top Chef Masters, a more refined version of the show which eliminates the personal-gain aspect of the original program by featuring renowned and well-established chefs competing to raise funds for their favorite charities. The players in question are Ashley Merriman, from the sixth season of Top Chef, a young lesbian who works as a chef in Seattle and protests when asked...