Are you there, Bravo? It's me, Carly
Confessionals are when chefs talk directly to the camera. What patterns can we see in confessional data?
In some ways, these posts are my version of a confessional. I get to say what’s on my mind, Tom edits me for clarity, and what you as a reader get is a clear picture of the story we found in the data.
The editors of Top Chef are story tellers. They put together the story of a season, often through the chefs’ own words. It’s a chance for us as viewers to get to know the chefs. There are probably lots of different reasons why we hear from one chef and not another…maybe a chef is struggling, or they’re explaining something that us non-chefs wouldn’t know, or the dish they’re creating is in honor of a family member. Perhaps some chefs are better at narrating than others, so it’s to the benefit of the audience to hear from them more frequently. The analyses I show here are for description only; by no means should it be taken as advice or critique of the edit of the show.
The key concepts here are the confessional and the edit.
A confessional is when the chef is talking directly to the camera by themselves (or sometimes, in their pair for a team challenge. Power Bottoms, anyone?). Often, their name will appear at the bottom of the screen. If there’s a series of extremely quick confessionals less than a second long strung together, I don’t count any of those as confessionals. If a confessional is broken up by content, but it’s less than about a 10-second break between confessionals, I actually count it just as one confessional. It’s not precise, but gives a general sense of how frequently we see each chef.
The edit for each episode is comparing the chef’s individual confessional count to the total number of confessionals by all chefs divided by the number of chefs in the episode. Being over-shown means that the chef was shown more than would be expected if everyone received the same number of confessionals. Under-shown is when a chef was shown less than would be expected if everyone had the same number of confessionals.