For the past half-century, American directors have stuffed their films with citations of other films, television shows, and pop-culture artifacts. In his 1982 essay “The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond),” Noël Carroll argued that allusion “has become a major expressive device” in American cinema, with many popular films employing a “two-tiered system of communication” in which a subset of the audience appreciates the work as much for its knowing references as for its more familiar “action/drama/fantasy” pleasures. While much American film and television continues to operate on these two levels, subsequent decades have seen a kind of democratizing of allusionism, such that a large portion of the contemporary audience has come to expect and appreciate a weave of cross-references in their popular media. The intricate interconnections of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” no less than Quentin Tarantino’s bricolage testify to this.

Over the years, Tim Burton’s films have helped to tutor the mass audience in the pleasures of allusionism. His earliest works, even those with “original” premises, rely almost entirely on allusions for their meanings and effects. His stop-motion short Vincent (1982) concerns a boy’s fascination with Vincent Price, particularly the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he made for American International Pictures in the 1960s. The live-action Luau (also 1982) pastiches several genres of 1960s drive-in movies. Burton’s first features are less pure instances of allusionism, but only slightly. His breakthrough, Beetlejuice (1988), is a horror-comedy dense with references to The Wizard of Oz, The Fly, and The Exorcist. Edward Scissorhands (1990) might have been pitched as Frankenstein Meets Beauty and the Beast. Mars Attacks! (1997) is a parody of Cold War alien-invasion films.

Adaptations and remakes arguably represent one end-point of this reliance on allusion, and Burton took this short leap early in his career. His critical cachet and attraction to cultural recyclables made him an ideal director for studios’ efforts to revive valuable intellectual property. In 1986, for a rebooted Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Burton re-filmed the 1964 teleplay adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Jar.” Warner Brothers’ Batman (1989) was a landmark in corporate synergy for its integrated marketing and merchandising and for its legacy of comic-book blockbusters. Fox’s Planet of the Apes (2001) was a failed effort to reboot a franchise. Even outside of a blockbuster context, Burton has been drawn to familiar stories with prominent cinematic or televisual intertexts, from Sleepy Hollow (2009; it owes as much to the 1949 Disney animation as to Washington Irving’s story) to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005).

Burton’s association with Disney goes back 35 years, to his origins as an animator for the company in the late 1970s. Vincent was, in fact, a Walt Disney Production. His work has exhibited a scholarly devotion to Disney history, as in Corpse Bride‘s quotation of the 1929 Silly Symphony “Skeleton Dance.” The first feature Burton made for the company was Ed Wood (1994), distributed by Disney’s “adult” imprint Touchstone. Although the stuff of Ed Wood’s no-budget films would seem worlds away from Disney’s ethos, Burton’s biopic lightly sanitizes its subject, effecting a willfully ahistorical transformation of what Jonathan Rosenbaum has called Wood’s “miserable, abject failure of a career” into a postmodern “celebration” whose affected innocence is paradoxically a function of the film’s (and tacitly the audience’s) knowingness. In other words, Burton Disney-fies Ed Wood. This operation is akin to the remaking of Uncle Walt himself in 2013’s relatively edgy—for Disney—Saving Mr. Banks, which engages its audience’s knowing skepticism about Disney only to revise and revive his myth, as Mike Budd argues in a recent essay for Jump Cut.

Alice in Wonderland was thus not just a joining of two brands but a reunion, one that Dumbo will extend. It was also an especially profitable instance of the ubiquitous corporate practice of recycling intellectual property. The Walt Disney Company helped to popularize this strategy in the mid-20th century and has relied upon it more than ever in the 21st; witness their recent acquisitions of the Muppets, Marvel Entertainment, and the Star Wars franchise. Within this broad program of recycled properties is a systematic campaign, often credited to Walt Disney Pictures’ Sean Bailey, to reinvigorate interest in their “legacy” films through a new series of high-profile features. In addition to remakes of Alice, Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016), Pete’s Dragon (2016), and Dumbo Disney has produced a “re-imagining” of Sleeping Beauty (Maleficent, 2014) and a fictionalized “making-of” Mary Poppins (Saving Mr. Banks). There are a host of other, slightly more ambiguous cases in the works. These films not only generate or promise huge profits. They also turn the settings and characters of discrete stories into franchise fodder. In this context, allusions allow intellectual properties to exfoliate: Sleeping Beauty spins off Maleficent, which spins off a Disney Channel series, and so on. Films like Saving Mr. Banks and Maleficent also serve as feature-length advertisements for Disney’s film library, which had historically been subject to carefully-spaced-out theatrical revivals and then limited DVD and Blu-Ray editions. This new cycle of remakes and other franchise-extenders is, among other things, Disney’s response to a stagnating home-video market.

Disney has sought to validate its remake of Dumbo by reference to Tim Burton’s body of work. The WSJ report, no doubt inspired by a Disney press release, made sure to note that “[c]ircus motifs have been a favorite of Mr. Burton . . . going back to the Red Triangle Circus Gang in his Batman Returns.” This tenuous association appears quaint in light of the deeper connection that Burton has to Disney and the process that has governed his career for at least a quarter of a century: the aesthetic logic of allusionism converging with the corporate logic of franchising.

However, while these showrunners and others like them have cultivated active and expansive social media profiles, the work of framing professional identity through Twitter is not reserved for the famous or infamous. While we can—and should—think of this in terms of below-the-line laborers, I also want to use this as an opportunity to explore the varied jobs under the “showrunner” umbrella. Although this title has become associated with those who create and subsequently shape the creative vision of a television series, showrunner also applies to the producers hired to “run” a show alongside its initial creator, laborers who are often less commonly associated with the rise of “showrunner” discourse within the industry.

Popular discourses on TV authorship have focused on figures like Matthew Weiner or Vince Gilligan who are decidedly “TV authors” in their control over the visions of their respective series. However, in the instance that the creator of a series lacks the experience, aptitude, or time necessary to fill the role of showrunner, more experienced writer/producers are brought in to shepherd the ship. While their labor is far from invisible, these showrunners are nonetheless unable to access certain authorship positions given that they are executing someone else’s vision, most often brought on after the pilot stage; similarly, those who created a series but are not serving the role of showrunner have limited access to discourses of authorship as the series moves forward. In the former case, although the rise of showrunner discourse has traditionally been associated with questions of authorship, here we see the day-to-day role of a showrunner imagined primarily through management, despite the fact that management involves considerable creative input; in the latter case, although creators maintain access to narratives of vision and creativity, they must also navigate the labor of those running the show day-to-day.

This reality reframes Twitter as a space where the respective roles of creators and “post-pilot showrunners” are negotiated. Fox’s Sleepy Hollow is the first credit for co-creator Phillip Iscove, who remains a supervising producer alongside showrunner Mark Goffman (The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip). Both are on Twitter, and both engage and interact with fans from a position of authorship by answering questions or offering teases of future episodes. However, both consistently avoid claiming sole authorship over the series: in these similar tweets sent to fans, they each emphasize the collaborative nature of the series’ development, with neither having full access to the sole-authored television ideal we imagine when evoking terms like creator or showrunner.

Their careful deference to the other’s labor—and the labor of mega-producers Bob Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Len Weisman—is a necessary trait when working in a situation like this one. John Wirth has become known for playing a part in such situations, recently stepping in as the post-pilot showrunner for Fox’s Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles and NBC’s The Cape. In a recent conversation, Wirth spoke of his experience working alongside creator Josh Friedman on Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, and said “my job on that show was to help him make [his vision] happen, and fight all the studio battles and network battles on his behalf to promote his vision of the show.” At the same time, of course, Wirth was simultaneously contributing to his own professional identity, which this past year led AMC to hire Wirth to take over as showrunner on western Hell on Wheels for its third season.

Wirth’s experience on Hell on Wheels reinforces the need to consider the production culture surrounding showrunners on a case-by-case basis. While similar to Wirth’s past experience given that he is taking over a series created by someone else, the situation is unique in the complete absence of the original creators: Wirth is replacing the departing showrunner who previously worked alongside creators Joe and Tony Gayton, whose own contract on the series was not renewed after season two. As a result, although Wirth may not have created the series, he is not tied to someone else’s vision, and has access to sole authorship of its narrative direction moving forward in its recently completed third and upcoming fourth seasons.

An image Wirth shared from the set of Hell on Wheels, featuring series script supervisor Sabrina Paradis.

Wirth is not among the more active showrunners on Twitter, but it has nonetheless become a space—along with interviews like the one I conducted—where he can make these claims to authorship. He interacts with fans, tweets photos taken on the set in Calgary, Alberta, offers teases regarding his plans for the upcoming fourth season, and livetweeted Saturday night broadcasts of the series, all practices that are common among showrunners who have always been the sole creative vision behind a series. While these tweets serve a purpose as promotion for the series and as community-building exercises for the show’s fans, they also give Wirth to ability to separate his labor from discourses of management toward discourses of vision and creativity, a task that becomes easier without the need to defer to others’ labor.

As we head further into a period where showrunners engaging in self-disclosures through Twitter has become a common practice within the television industry, those self-disclosures are inevitably intersecting with parallel realities of the television industry. In the case of Iscove, Goffman, and Wirth, we are seeing existing, nuanced discourses of authorship functioning within the industry being reframed through social media practices not necessarily designed to communicate said nuance (unless we count the limited affordances of the biography section on Twitter, highlighted in the above image), requiring specific negotiation and investigation that will remain throughout the runs of their respective series.

Almost Human [Premiered 11/17/2013]

Karl Urban stars as John Kennex, a no-nonsense cop in a future where every cop is paired with an android partner. Re-entering the force after a personal tragedy, he’s paired with Dorian (Michael Ealy), a rejected android model whose emotional capacities are heightened. They form an uneasy partnership to confront a corrupt world, one case at a time.

Kit Hughes [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

This is a show that wants its viewers to ask, “ah, but which one of them is ‘almost human’?”

I have other questions.

1. Why should we care about anything in this future, which seems to be populated only by abusive cops, robots with weird cheekbones, and crime/“the syndicate”?
   1. Is it because there are allegedly some good noodles places and that one pale, creepy science guy who’s in every procedural (you know, to shore up the masculinity of the protagonist) still listens to Depeche Mode?
   2. How do we distinguish allusion from cliché writing?
      1. Fake epithets (“synthetics”) and underground medicine (“Recollectionists”); seriously?
      2. Is AH’s characterization of its villains lazier for ripping off the masks in V for Vendetta or for simply calling them “the syndicate”?
      3. Why can’t people leave Blade Runner alone?
      4. Could this show actually have something interesting to say about the monstrosity of bureaucratic records-keeping systems, data collection, and the politics of access?
         1. Could it move past its gleeful focus on surveillance?
         2. Why was their evidence locker so bright? Doesn’t the future care about preservation storage conditions?
         3. Will any show ever recapture the delightful chemistry of Perfect Strangers?

Jenna Stoeber [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

A set up so classic it seems like something from a satire; technology/crime/drugs are out of control. John (Karl Urban), a renegade human police officer with a mysteriously disappeared ex-girlfriend, memory problems, a pill addiction, and a synthetic leg, loses his partner in a tragic-heroic accident. The majority of the episode takes place post-recovery, when he is partnered up with Dorian (Michael Ealy), an emotional, buggy android. The set-up is a classic buddy-cop odd-couple formula.

Like much cyberpunk media, it features a vaguely pan-Asian design-skin that looks like it was ripped from Blade Runner. The morality and characters are pure I, Robot, and there’s even a dash of the Saw franchise mixed in for flavor; The whole episode has a cinematic feel to it, perhaps due to the high production value and well executed design. And yet, there’s something distinctly uncomfortable with watching Urban rampage through the episode, alternatively harassing and assaulting people, and being generally unbearably unpleasant. I suppose his aggressive interactions with Ealy are meant to be read as social commentary, but lack the follow through to be anything other than bizarrely offensive. Luckily, after roughly 20 minutes of being partners, they bond over synthetic body parts, and, gee, discrimination is solved!

Brooklyn Nine-Nine [Premiere 09/17/2013]

A workplace comedy that happens to be set at a police station, Andy Samberg stars as a typically immature—for Samberg—detective, Jake Peralta, whose ecosystem is threatened by the presence of new chief Ray Holt, played by Andre Braugher. Surrounded by supporting players not dissimilar to those found on co-creator Mike Schur’s Parks and Recreation, including Melissa Fumero’s eager detective who looks to Holt as a mentor figure, the two cops must balance their respective career goals with the new comic situation in front of them.

Alyx Vesey [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Brooklyn Nine-Nine brings law enforcement back to the workplace sitcom. But it’s also a comment on the buddy cop genre. Molly Eichel signposted the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video. I’d add The Heat, which referenced Lethal Weapon to foreground women’s professional friendships. This parallels Andy Samberg’s roast of James Franco, which mocked the “tradition” of capitulating to racist, sexist, and homophobic insult humor. Jake Peralta riffs on an archetype, trading Martin Riggs’ self-destruction for arrested development.

What is most promising about the pilot’s commentary on heteromasculinity is its pervasiveness. Take Andre Braugher’s authoritative performance as Ray Holt, precinct 99’s new no-nonsense commanding officer. Toward the end of the pilot, Holt reveals that it took so long to become captain because the NYPD was uncomfortable with his homosexuality. I like Melissa Fumero as Detective Amy Santiago, a focused, unsentimental woman who won’t back down from a challenge, even if she’s dousing sandwiches in hot sauce. I appreciated the wink to Cagney and Lacey, after whom Sergeant Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews) named his daughters. I’m also intrigued by the tentative connection between detective Rose Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz), detective Charles Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) and administrator Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti), as I’d like to see gifted physical comedian Lo Truglio (the muffin scene!) play romance.

Some jokes rubbed me the wrong way. Peralta and Santiago compete to see who can arrest more people because filtering citizens through the prison industrial complex is hilarious? The Disco Strangler brandished a yo-yo, ha? But the runner of older women going about their day while the team nabs criminals tickled me. I’ll take another coffee break with this crew.

Evan Elkins [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Newsradio remains the gold standard against which I judge all ensemble television comedies. This is patently unfair, but it’s how my brain works. To my mind, the flawless cast (yes, even Joe Rogan. But seriously, take another look at that Newsradio cast) and ingenious, multi-cam-meets-Jacques-Tati staging still haven’t been matched. There are other contenders, some of which can be traced back through the lineage of Brooklyn Nine-Nine co-creator Michael Schur, but it’s Newsradio that, above all others, shows me the heights that the ensemble comedy genre can reach.

One episode in, Brooklyn Nine-Nine doesn’t wither under my harsh, Newsradio-comparing gaze as much as most programs do. In fact, it might be the funniest cop-comedy pilot since Poochinski. While it’s nothing special formally—it sticks to a now-familiar, unremarkable single-cam format, in part to half-heartedly invoke the look of a cop drama when it needs to—the cast is pretty terrific. In particular, I’m always happy to encounter Jo Lo Truglio, who can play a middle-aged sad sack better than anyone at this point (though I imagine his character’s quirks will be significantly less weird than they wound up being in the second season of Burning Love.)

Anyway, once it finds its footing—and it’s already quite a bit further along than most comedy pilots—it could contribute to a pretty solid Fox Tuesday night lineup. Just pretend Dads doesn’t exist.

Jennifer Smith [Independent Scholar]

“The only puzzle he hasn’t solved is how to grow up.” This description of protagonist Jake Peralta (at the conclusion of an awkwardly expository list of character summaries delivered by the squad’s captain early in the pilot) perfectly summarizes the central problem with Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Andy Samberg’s man-child persona. In a cast as diverse as this one, the central focus on one of the only straight white men – and a petulant, obnoxious one at that – is disappointing, if sadly unsurprising.

Creator Michael Schur’s Parks and Recreation works so well because Leslie Knope, overwhelming as she may sometimes be, is both inherently likable and unique in the current television landscape. But here, in a world (a police precinct) where the stakes are high and the supporting cast is full of complex, interesting individuals, the focus rests on the same irritating, immature, sexually-harassing schlub found at the center of any Chuck Lorre sitcom.

I’d love to keep watching for the sake of the other characters, especially the brilliant Andre Braugher’s older, gay, black police captain (the polar opposite of a stock character). But unless Peralta quickly solves the aforementioned puzzle, I’m not sure how long I can stick around.

Anne Gilbert [Rutgers University]

Brooklyn Nine-Nine has a lot going for it from the start – the writers crib effectively from police procedurals to shorthand all the crime solving, the cast has an easy sense of camaraderie, and Andre Braugher’s knowing, poker-faced delivery is comedy gold. But before I can get on board, the show needs to get to know its tone; the pilot is balancing in a no man’s land between “quirky” and “downright absurd.”

There will be inevitable comparisons to Scrubs, which juggled a similar serious content/wacky delivery approach, but Brooklyn Nine-Nine hasn’t yet made the commitment to a similar level of weird. Instead, it has a pervasive wry and offbeat tone that genuinely works, but gets thrown off-kilter with, for instance, the flashback of the Disco Strangler going after a victim with a blinking yo-yo, or Samberg’s Detective Peralta sporting a garish Speedo swimsuit in an attempt to prove a point – or, honestly, every attempt to tell me, again and again, that Peralta is actually meant to be a good detective.

As of now, it’s a fun show that, if it is able to find its feet and develop its characters, could eventually be really funny.

~ ~ ~

Sleepy Hollow [Premiered 09/16/2013]

A time-traveling Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) wakes up in modern day Sleepy Hollow to discover his nemesis the Headless Horseman is still wreaking havoc; he also informs the Sheriff’s deputy who discovers him (Nicole Beharie) that the Headless Horseman is actually one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Death. Death also has a machine gun. And he wants his head back. Thus begins a journey into a mythology rife with presidential bibles, witches, and fated connections between an odd-couple male/female pairing from the minds of Phillip Iscove and producers Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and director Len Wiseman.

William Proctor [University of Sunderland]

The synopsis of Sleepy Hollow sounds deliciously absurd: take the principle character of the Washington Irving novel, Ichabod Crane, and his nemesis, the Headless Horseman, throw in a dose of temporal mayhem and, like other contemporary myth translations, bring it kicking and screaming – and slicing – into the 21^st century. The pilot episode begins to develop the show’s mythos and world-building with economy and panache. There is plenty of potential here and, despite the derivative nature of the narrative – it could be a season-long arc of Supernatural, for instance – the chemistry between protagonists Ichabod and his cop side-kick is satisfying enough to warrant interest. One gets the feeling that the writers have their tongue firmly rooted in their cheek and set out to have fun. Clancy Brown, who played the Kurgan in 1980s cult classic Highlander with demonic delight, provides a cameo and is summarily decapitated early in the episode – the irony of which will not be lost on avid connoisseurs of pop culture and fans of Highlander (remember the tag-line and accompanying Queen song? ‘Don’t lose your head’). Some of the humour is in bad taste (asking a black police officer if she is ‘emancipated from slavery’ misses the mark somewhat), but the overall tone of the show is breezy and full of joie de vivre, a palliative to the sombre atmosphere of this post-Dark Knight world.

Taylor Cole Miller [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Last week before class, I showed my students some trailers for fall premieres, among them FOX’s Sleepy Hollow. While I introduced the title, a few scooted up in their seats, excitedly anticipating what might’ve been Downton Abbey meets American Horror Story–a period scare-piece to relish in the ever-earlier, ever-colder Wisconsin darkness. After a few scenes, though, most lost interest, preferring instead to relish their last few minutes of cellular freedom. If a 1790s Sleepy Hollow was too boring for Hollywood, a 2013 “modern-day retelling” with guns was too boring for them–and for me, too.

I hesitate to be so cynical, especially because Sleepy Hollow is really more like the homely lovechild of two very capable parents: The X Files and Hocus Pocus. Perhaps I’d be quick to forgive, then, because I really want to love it. But the pilot is burdened by the weight of a new mythology that it data-dumps on us while confronting its ancient protagonist with his “enlightened” racism (“Nay, I do not support slavery!”), baffling technology, a gun-wielding redcoat, and a George-Washington Jesus.

But ultimately, I AM pessimistic. The pilot isn’t even fully invested in itself–the humor is as tentative as the horror. I’ll be unlikely to follow Sleepy Hollow as it stomps around searching for purpose–sometimes for humor, sometimes for pity–not all together unlike its infamous headless horseman himself.

C. Lee Harrington [Miami University]

Me likey! With “Sympathy for the Devil” and two beheadings in the first ten minutes, count me in. I don’t remember enough about the original story to be bothered by inconsistencies so this was pure fun: respectable acting, nice atmospheric touches, acceptable evocation of the supernatural (excepting the horse’s eyes, whaaat?), packed full of backstory, a bit of humor, and pretty much what a premiere should be.

I didn’t much go for the romantic subtext between Abby and Ichabod given everything the characters had gone through but I understand the point from a production perspective. And I didn’t much go for Ichabod’s ease with finding himself in the 21^st century: he never asks what year it is, is more bemused over a car’s power windows than freaked out that something like cars even exist, and finds the trappings of mass commercial culture only mildly interesting.

The premiere sets up interesting questions for the series as a whole: What does Andy know and how does he know it? For that matter, what did George Washington know and how did he know it? Who all is part of the coven? What’s with that bird?  I’ll definitely watch next week.

Jenna Stoeber (University of Wisconsin – Madison)

The series premiere of Sleepy Hollow starts out with a rough recounting of Washington Irving’s famous story; it has to start this way, otherwise the audience would spend the rest of the episode struggling to connect the premise of the show with the legend. The plot seems to be taking a something-for-everyone approach, offering up magic, historical fantasy, biblical prophecy, hints of an Illuminati conspiracy theory, and a guest appearance by George Washington. However, this is a minor complaint. Aside from the scattershot of plot threads and the heaps of exposition, very little about the episode feels like a premiere – in a good way. The story doesn’t dwell on the mundane aspects of the urban fantasy genre, namely the laborious magic-is-real coping that often drags down such shows. The writing is clever and entertaining, and the plot moves along at a brisk pace. Nicole Beharie, playing lieutenant Abbie Mills, performs her role like she’s been doing it for years, and the interactions between her and Tom Mison, playing Ichabod Crane, are captivating. The episode wasn’t without cheesiness – the image of the headless horseman with a bandolier and a shotgun is certainly a wake-up call – but the absurdity is grounded in Beharie’s exceptional performance. I look forward to seeing which plot threads they pick up in next week’s episode.

MasterChef Junior [Premiered 09/27/2013]

In this spinoff, Chef Gordon Ramsay invites us to remember American Juniors with a pint-size take on his successful MasterChef series, toning down the vindictive to walk talented young chefs through the competition.

R. Colin Tait [Texas Christian University]

With Friday’s release of his sixth show for the FOX network, super-chef Gordon Ramsay scores a homerun with the junior version of MasterChef. By tweaking the formula so that restaurateur Joe Bastianich and celebrity chef Gordon Eliot can praise, rather than cut down, the contestants, the creative team has created a rarity on TV – a reality show that concentrates on celebrating and supporting its competitors, rather than berating them for their lack of talent. Of course, it helps that these contestants are adorable and precocious children.

By focusing on children rather than adults, the show stacks the equation for audiences too, making it nearly impossible not to root for them, especially when they collapse into tears of joy or sadness, as they often do. These would-be chefs also bring out the soft side in the normally abrasive hosts, who are not only on their best behavior here, but whose personas actually seem charming in comparison to the adult version of the show. This is especially true of Ramsay and co-host Bastianich, whose sunny dispositions are a welcome change.

My only complaint is that these would-be-amateurs seem to come exclusively from society’s upper crust and come complete with refined palettes of the cultural elite. But, otherwise, this show is guaranteed to please parents and their children alike.

Karen Petruska [University of California – Santa Barbara]

The main reasons to watch MasterChef—both the grown-up version and the new tiny human spinoff featuring kids 8-13 years old—are the charming and charismatic chef judges (fathers all), from Gordon Ramsay of Hell’s Kitchen fame, Graham Elliot as the “nice” judge, and my personal favorite culinary crush, Joe Bastianich, know for his steely stare and for smelling food before tasting it. While this version of the program sticks closely to the tested formula established by the adult version, the series nevertheless continues to find success in mining for food-oriented tension. It also features some pretty cute kids who reveal a remarkable level of self-possession and self-confidence.

They prepare dishes from French macaroons to homemade pasta, and the judges agree that every single dish is very good, even though a few kids receive gentle critiques about dry shortcake or overcooked pasta. Ramsay is best known for his cursing, but what he really does well (especially on Hell’s Kitchen) is teach. So far it seems we won’t get contestant cattiness, always an element of the adult version, but I will be interested to see if the kids form friendships and if the program lets us see them suffer inevitable disappointment (their parents, off on the sidelines, never speak but are there to offer a hug for those who do not advance). If the program maintains its current tone of constant, consistent inspiration for the love of food, it is something I’d encourage my own nieces to watch. Maybe they’ll be inspired, too.