Fresh faces: meeting the chefs in episode 1
How frequently do we see the winners in episode 1?
I’ve often wondered if the first episode of a reality competition show gives anything away. I imagine that there are a lot of factors that go into a first episode…introducing us to all the characters competitors, introducing or reminding the audience about the rules and the stakes, balancing narration through confessionals (the talking head moments where contestants tell us what they were thinking at that moment) with the action, setting up any potential conflicts or villain/hero arcs for the season… it goes on and on. (And this is just in my imagination; I’ve got zero experience with editing a show!)
In the spirit of not letting perfect be the enemy of good enough, I collected confessional data on the first episode of 11 of the 22 seasons. I try to be consistent with my data collection, but it’s certainly not perfect. Some of my rules for counting confessionals (a bit more detail than my previous post):
If a confessional is less than 3 seconds, especially if it’s rapidly changing between many contestants, I don’t count it
If a confessional from one person is broken up in two chunks with less than a 10 second interval in between, I count it as one.
Confessionals with two contestants get counted as one for each of them.
Analyses only include confessionals from chefs still competing; while I have confessional data for the sous chefs in the finale, I don’t include those in the total count of the episode, unless otherwise specified.
Fascinatingly, none of Sara Bradley’s sous chefs had confessionals in the Season 16 Kentucky finale, but both of Kelsey Barnard Clark’s sous chefs had multiple confessionals.
In Top Chef, the potential factors that could affect contestants’ screen time is their outcome for the challenges. It would make sense that those who did very well or very poorly would be seen more than those who were in the middle. In the future, I’ll do this for all seasons, the way that I did for Season 22.
If you’re a visual learner, jump to the figure below. Below is a figure that looks at the winners of each season and what proportion of that season’s episode 1’s confessionals they received. I compare that proportion to what would be expected if all the chefs received the same number in episode 1. The expected proportion varies by season because there are different numbers of chefs in each season. If the chef had more confessionals than expected, they are considered to be “overshown.” Similarly, if they had fewer confessionals than expected, they are considered to be “undershown.”