Put in SAT terms (or Miller's terms, as I don't think they have analogies on the SAT any more, do they?):
Hell's Kitchen is to Lord of the Flies as The Next Food Network Star is to Some book where people do things without a lot of cussing or pushing of plates into chests.
Of course, the aims of the two shows are different. Where Gordon Ramsay is taking his usual boot camp approach to find someone worthy of getting a restaurant, Food Network is trying to develop a new talent who has never been on TV before. And given that the TV angle is kind of important to having a Food Network show, a little more patience and guidance is required.
The basic premise is that Food TV picked eight finalists (actually, I think they picked seven and Internet voting picked the eighth) who compete in various challenges related to being a TV chef. There's no winning the challenges, other than impressing the host Mark Summers, any guest chefs who happen to be around (Bobby Flay tonight, Mario Batali in the next episode), and the three-person selection committee that decides who gets cut at the end of the episode (made up of a couple of Food TV execs and Gordon Elliott).
We missed most of the episode where the finalists were introduced, but did catch the second one, which focused on TV chef skills (cooking while reading from the prompter, swapping pans to show finished dishes, etc.). They also did a thing where each contestant had something go wrong while icing a cake, just to see how they reacted to the unexpected.
Unlike most unscripted shows, where such things would be handled with high (edited-in) drama and vituperous contestants, the proceedings here were more civil. It's a refreshing change to see an unscripted show that, on some level, actually cares about the process and people involved in finding a winner.
If you tune into unscripted programming for the backstabbing and such, The Real Gilligan's Island is probably more for you. Foodies, I think, will get a bit of a kick out this show, though.
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