7

MasterChef
Cooking Competition across Cultures
Louann Haarman

Introduction

MasterChef is a competitive cooking show, currently broadcast in over

50 countries in a format that combines features of career-oriented pro-
grammes with conventional game show procedures. The remarkable
success of the franchise and its subsequent spin-offs has sparked a grow-
ing body of work on ‘the MasterChef phenomenon’, most of it dealing
specifically with MasterChef Australia (e.g. Lewis 2011; Bednarek 2013).
The popularity of the programme has much to do with the format.
As Chalaby (2011: 294) has noted in a discussion of the TV format trade
as a global industry, reality, talent and factual entertainment formats are
‘designed to create dramatic arcs and produce story lines’ where ‘the nar-
rative arc is based on the journey that the contestant makes which, in
the most dramatic cases, transforms their lives’ (emphasis in original).1
While global phenomena, however, these programmes would appear to
be ultimately dependent on the audience’s identification and affirma-
tion of aspects of the national culture and identity. Turner (2005), in a
study on cultural identity, soap narrative and reality TV, shows how the
Australian Big Brother gradually transformed the discourse of the original
British version with its ‘expectations of conflict and sexual adventure’
and emphasis on extroversion. Turner attributes this ‘indigenization’ in
part to production choices in the editing stages to focus on narrative
strategies typical of Australian soap opera (‘upbeat, sunny, community
oriented’), and to emphasise the soap opera’s ‘suburbanality’ in the
Australian-ness of the house, with its pool, barbecue, vegetable garden
and chicken coop. By the end of the first season,

the values underpinning the discussion of behaviors both in the

house and outside became progressively more traditional, more

158
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© The Editor(s) 2015
 Louann Haarman 159

oriented toward helping the group of housemates function for the

good of all its members. Rather than becoming increasingly individ-
ualistic as relationships in the house splintered under the pressure of
competition [. . .] the group of housemates turned itself into a family.
(2005: 420)

Aslama and Pantti (2007) found similar results in an analysis of the

Finnish Extreme Escapades, concluding that the programme ‘reproduces
national identity in multiple taken-for-granted, invisible, or unnoticed
details’ [. . .] Formats may escape national boundaries, but the need for
national belonging remains’2 (2007: 64–65).
Turner (2005: 415) suggests that the way to examine ‘the local’ in ‘the
global’ might best be through ‘mapping processes of appropriation and
adaptation rather than through the proposition of any thoroughgoing
specificity or uniqueness’. This chapter addresses such (different) ‘local’
realisations of the MasterChef global franchise through a discussion of
British, American and Australian episodes of the programme; it discerns
where those differences and similarities lie and how the participants are
displayed in the different cultural contexts.

Preliminary information regarding format and procedure

MasterChef (hereafter MC) is an edited programme assembled from

many hours of live recording during the course of the competition.
A profile of some essential features of the different country editions is
set out in Table 7.1. The data refer to the 2014 season.3 As may be seen,
the original MasterChef series was British, and its current revised format
remains unique with respect to the other franchised versions considered
here, which have opted – to varying degrees – for a more aggressively
competitive procedure and the awarding of significant monetary and
other prizes.

Data and methodology

The corpus on which this chapter is based refers principally to episodes

in the 2013 and 2014 seasons. The qualitative and comparative method-
ology is based on videos and transcripts of the episodes. Attention
is focused on differences in format and editorial practices, as well as
on the construction of the participants’ roles and social identities as
they emerge in the programme. The analysis thus first reviews consis-
tent production choices in the various countries which determine a