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On Netflixs global cooking competitionThe Final Table, the food looks really, really good.
Watching the show, you cant help but want to eat.
(Several times while watching, I was impelled to order a disappointing approximation from Seamless.)
But by comparison, they just look a little … plain.
OnRamsays Best Restaurant, even Michelin-starred masterpieces seem stark and spartan, shot without flair.
Why such a conspicuous difference?
Its not thatRamsays Best Restaurantis some artless mediocrity andThe Final Tablean exemplar of televisual panache.
They simply represent two different eras of a genre that evolved suddenly in ways surprising and quietly revolutionary.
Its calledChefs Table, and it changed the way documentary TV looks.
The Gordon Ramsaytype shows are in a different category of filmmaking.
Its a different world than were living in.
Whereas were coming from a feature-filmmaking background, a narrative background.
Were way more deliberate.
Theyre very different things.
It originally came from a place of ignorance, he says.
He saw what we had and was like,How is this gonna work?
It was just so foreign to him that you would shoot a documentary with this cumbersome narrative-cinema package.
But we werent really thinking about doing anything efficiently.
We were taking our time.
We were just thinking of making a movie.
It wasnt just Bricker who had little experience making this kind of thing.
It was everyone and that was the point.
We were trying to make a kind of food show that had never been done before.
We tend to think of inexperience as a shortcoming.
ForChefs Table, it was an asset.
They came from different backgrounds and brought narrative experience toChefs Table.
This whole thing was gonna be viewed as a film.
Were making a film here, he recalls.
Its technically a TV show.
But this is a film, with full contrast and deep, saturated colors.
Four years later, he says, its almost like the playbook for documentaries.
What I was looking for was to make it look like a movie, Gelb recalls.
I didnt want it to feel like a normal documentary.
I wanted it to feel like a real movie.
He had two tenets for the film: cinematic presentation and emotional storytelling.
The rest mattered less.
And that was kind of the DNA of the show.
So why had nobody thought to make a food documentary that looks likeKoyaanisqatsibeforeJiro?
The RED One camera, Gelb says, was completely nonfunctional for a documentary shoot.
It took 90 seconds to boot up.
It would overheat all the time.
Somehow, Gelb pulled it off.
We dont makeChefs Tablethe easy way, McGinn says.
Its not an easy show to do.
Since its April 2015 debut, theChefs Tablestyle has gone from cutting edge to the prevailing TV norm.
Its charming and generous and informative, and naturally, it also looks great.
The simplest things get the movie-star treatment, Nosrat says.
We had a joke the whole time: No classical music.
No slo-mo, she says with a laugh.
Gelb and McGinn are perfectly aware of their influence.
They put it out there, and it changed the game, Reid says.
I see that everywhere.
Doesnt matter what genre is.
True crime looks like that.
A cinematic experience like that, its now a prerequisite.
Thats the pitch now:Chefs Tablefor wine.Chefs Tablefor cars.Chefs Tablefor lens-making.
There have been some really well-made parodies of the show on YouTube.
It makes us realize that we have to push our storytelling forward, Gelb says.
A style that can be easily parodied, after all, is a style at risk of growing stale.
We cant just take it for granted that the show is going to look beautiful and thatll be enough.
