TV: Dinner Date Australia Review

Dinner Date Australia features one single girl going on three blind dates with three men – with one twist – they’ll all be cooking for her and she’s picked them out on the basis of their menus.

Let’s get one thing out of the way.

If you’re tuning into Dinner Date Australia because you want to see Manu Feildel, forget it. Feildel spends about one minute onscreen during this and I don’t reckon he would remember any of the names of the people involved. He doesn’t get involved in the segments or offer any cooking advice, he is just the guy top-and-tail-ing the segments. This is a role where his French accent is a bigger asset than any sort of cooking expertise he may or may not have.*

*Hey, and he just won Dancing with the Stars! Isn't that lucky considering he has this new show coming up?

Now that’s out the way, what is Dinner Date Australia? The answer is pretty simple - it’s ‘Perfect Match’ meets ‘My Kitchen Rules’. The production values are MKR 101. The premise is pretty hard to screw up - just capture all the awkward tension and charm of a first date and include lots of delicious looking food. It’s not easy to go wrong - and sure enough Dinner Date Australia is a solid, vaguely amusing, slightly depressing hour of utterly disposable television.

The main problem facing all the 'suitors' is that the dinner is being cooked while the date is happening, so that’s a high degree of difficulty for anyone to overcome. They fare better when they include their date in the cooking proceedings - as does the show - because then it becomes a cooking and dating show, not just a dating show with meals shot in close-up. The casting appears to be pretty good - in the first episode, the dater (Simone) is a very winning, watchable personality* – and that helps immeasurably.**

*She's also completely stunning.

**It’s also really fun to guess why everyone’s single. In the case of our second Romeo, it’s probably the ‘Italian stallion’ shirt. We get it, you’re Italian.

It’s all very pleasant and watchable but the whole experience is a bit soured by the annoying narrator, who takes that ‘Who Dares Wins’ approach to talking directly to contestants. “Oh, Jeff, what are you doing mate?!!!”. That’s annoying. I wanted the My Kitchen Rules narrator to come back and do his trick of creating drama where there was none, rather than admonishing contestants who can't hear him.

Other cheesy moments – the slick second prospect being smooth and the producers making the genius decision to play “Smooth Operator” over it. Really thought out of the box there, everyone. Also once the actual dates are over the show descends into cheesy dates shot with soft lighting that all gets a bit 'dating service ad from 1998'.

Overall, it’s mildly diverting television that doesn’t bring anything new to the dating show table. Would I be compelled to watch another episode? Not remotely. It’s about the gentlest television you could possibly find.

Which probably means it will rate its socks off.

Dinner Date Australia airs on Channel Seven 9:30pm Tuesday.


PS: Not to spoil anything, but the ending of the first episode is kind of depressingly predictable.

TV REVIEW - MY KITCHEN RULES

My Kitchen Rules made its debut early last year in a post-Masterchef haze as Channel Seven’s great white cooking show hope. It kicked off to good ratings and has since become one of my guilty pleasure shows – and Channel Seven are counting on improved ratings in its second season. Subtle as a sledgehammer, the editors desperately eke every ounce of drama out of an undercooked mushroom or a lumpy mousse. It’s great fun, but only if you don’t take it too seriously.

What makes My Kitchen Rules so much fun to watch is the dinner party conceit that opens up the series – it’s so entertaining to see the teams either unsubtly try to undermine each other or blissfully abandon all pretence of competition whatsoever and just enjoy being on TV.

The key to any reality TV show is the casting and this time around the agents have done a good job. This year the show features two sets of six teams after deigning to include pairs from Tasmania – and the first set have plenty of entertaining elements. In a series like this there is always a ‘villain’ team and we’re spoilt with two – the upstart bitchy housemates (SA last year, Vic this year) and the show’s most entertaining couple in sometime, the henpecker and henpeckee from Tasmania.

The other teams in the first set are also entertaining; the two butchers trying to set the world record for use of the word ‘mate’, the charming young sisters with Polish heritage, the ebullient used car salesman and his quiet wife and the delightful Italian cousins from Western Australia. (Don’t let the annoying, gimmicky, oh-my-goodness ads during the tennis put you off, they’re actually really lovely.) They’re mostly versions of teams we saw last year, but no less fun to watch.

The judges (Manu Fieldel and Pete Evans) are more confident this time around, carrying a swagger they didn’t have in the first season. They still indulge in annoying reality-show fakeouts like ‘I didn’t like it…(interminable pause)…I loved it” but they’re charming and good looking enough to keep the show watchable.

I’ll be putting up brief thoughts on each individual show as they come along – because as I said, this show is more in my wheelhouse than Masterchef is. Masterchef is all about inspiration and the life story behind the food we make. My Kitchen Rules doesn’t worry too much about that – cutting straight to the competition and being all the better for it. They’re both perfectly worthy reality shows but My Kitchen Rules has captured that same element that made it so ridiculously watchable last year – and that’s a good thing in my book.

MY FIVE MOST ANTICIPATED AUSTRALIAN-MADE TV SHOWS OF 2011

I’ll out myself straight away – I completely prefer American and British TV to Australian television. It’s not that Australian television is worse, necessarily, just that since we have a smaller population and a less splintered audience we tend not to take as many risks. When you don’t have sustainable ratings on offer for a show like Mad Men, for example, no one is going to risk making it.

Our strengths lie, as always, in comedy and reality television, where we tend to capture so much more of the Australian character. Perhaps this is because we are a nation that enjoys laughing at ourselves and doesn’t take things too seriously - perhaps a serious drama requires a bigger risk, I don’t know. All I know is that Australian television hasn’t quite made the leap British and American TV has made just yet.

So it is with high hopes and heavy optimism that I look towards the coming year and pray that we can make something – anything - of note. Here are my five most anticipated Australian-made TV shows of 2011.

And another thing – talking up television shows is kind of counter-intuitive for me as I think too much hype can kill a show because it can never meet our raised expectations. Take this article, then, as one pointing out shows you might not have known were going to be on television, rather than shows that WILL DEFINITELY BE AWESOME NO MATTER WHAT. That’s a recipe for expectation-based disaster.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

CLOUDSTREET (FOXTEL)

This program comes from a wonderful array of on and off-screen talent that will be allowed the creative freedom that making a show on pay-TV usually allows – and that can only mean good things. The only problem with making a television series from this beloved novel is that Winton’s prose is so evocative that the screen version faces the problem all screen adaptations face – is it ever going to be as good as it was in our head? This isn’t a problem when adapting a lesser known text but since a grand-majority of the television drama series watching public has already read the book, it will be a massive achievement to bring enough new things to the table to warrant exploring the television series as well.

ANGRY BOYS (ABC1)

Cloudstreet and Angry Boys are two shows that would probably be much higher on any other Australian television critic’s list and the reason they don’t make mine is a very simple one – they just aren’t in my wheelhouse. I appreciated but didn’t love Cloudstreet the novel and had very similar feelings about both of Chris Lilley’s television projects, We Could Be Heroes and Summer Heights High. Summer Heights High in particular felt like a long, extended sketch, filled with incredibly insightful characters and dialogue but short on enough jokes and character development to fill the running time.

5. MY KITCHEN RULES SEASON 2 (Channel 7, TBA)

Both of my honourable mentions will almost certainly be qualitatively better shows than My Kitchen Rules Season 2. Similarly, Masterchef will be more successful and better made than My Kitchen Rules Season 2. So why is My Kitchen Rules season 2 a show I’m looking forward to more than any of those shows? Because it has three blisteringly entertaining qualities:

1). Quintessentially Australian, tense, awkward, funny dinner party scenes in which one poor team is forced to sweat over a meal they’re making for their competitors as well as the judges. The passive-aggressive bitchiness as the other teams either begrudgingly appreciate or gleefully denigrate their opponent’s handiwork is a thing to behold.

2). A teamwork element missing in Masterchef where two people who have joined forces to enter the competition slowly discover each other’s weaknesses and strengths – and a train wreck component where every single team invariably plans their approach badly. I swear the production team just steal ingredients or adjust temperatures sometime to create drama. How do none of these teams ever do a dry run?

3). Judges and a production team with a completely misguided sense of the dramatic that accidentally works in their favour – creating moments of unintentional hilarity.

If you haven’t watched My Kitchen Rules because you dismissed it as a Masterchef knock-off (it owes more to the British Series Come Dine With Me), try it again. I found it incredibly entertaining the first time around and I’m glad it’s coming back.

4. ADAM HILLS IN GORDON STREET TONIGHT (Premering February 9^th on ABC1 at 8:30pm)

There’s not really too much I can say about this except that it features one of Australia’s most likeable television personalities in Adam Hills – and he’s been given his own tonight show. What more do you need? ‘Spicks and Specks’ lost its novelty some time ago but retains its whimsical corner of the television landscape, and it will be nice to see Hills branch out and do something (relatively) different.

3. WOODLEY (ABC, TBA)

An eight-part romantic comedy featuring the talents of Australia’s premier physical comedian, Frank Woodley.

The Adventures of Lano and Woodley was the seminal Australian comedy of my high school years* – that time in year eight and nine when you’re discovering for the first time what you really think is funny – and although I’d really prefer Colin Lane was involved in this rather than co-hosting the Circle (ugh) I can’t wait to see what Frank Woodley does in his own comedy series.

* See L&W episode ‘The Pool’ for a truly classic Australian comedy episode.

What looks extremely promising about this is that Woodley has indicated it is a physical-comedy based romantic drama of sorts – and if you’ve seen any of his recent theatre shows you’ll know he does a very good line in romantic, dramatic moments. The casting of Justine Clarke and Tom Long in the show also bodes well that it won’t just be a slapstick comedy and will have some meat to it. It’s those dramatic moments that might just lift ‘Woodley’ to some of the best television of the year.

2. THE SLAP (ABC1, TBA)

Based on the Christian Tsolkias novel, the eight one-hour episodes will be told from the perspectives of one of the eight primary characters, dealing with the fallout of a man slapping a child that was not his own. Featuring the talents of Melissa George, Sophie Okonedo, Alex Dimitriades and more.

I was halfway through ‘The Slap’ when I saw that it was being adapted for TV and immediately stopped reading it. I have a theory (one that I’ll also be applying to the upcoming US fantasy adaptation Game of Thrones) that I shouldn’t read a book in advance of watching the adaptation because otherwise I’ll always be comparing the TV show to the book, rather than judging the show on its own merits.

On that basis, I begrudgingly closed ‘The Slap’ and am greatly looking forward to the television version. From what I read, the book had two great advantages – a clever, accessible moral question at its core decorated by extremely well written and identifiable characters. If the series can capture the characters half as well as the book, we’ll have a great Australian mini-series on our hands.

1. 1. THE JOY OF SETS (Channel Nine, TBA)

I’m pretty confident this will be the only list on which this particular show is number one, but ever since I heard about it I’ve been looking forward to it. Two of my favourite comedians (and alumni of the heavily-missed Get This radio show) join forces in a no doubt irreverent and witty take on the world of television. Tony Martin (of the D-Generation, Late Show and countless other brilliant projects) and Ed Kavalee (of TV Burp, Cup Fever and Thank God You’re Here) will be backed by the Zapruder’s Other Films production juggernaut.

I can’t really explain why I am looking forward to this show so much except to say that Martin and Kavalee have a very specific chemistry that just works and with the full might of Andrew Denton behind them, I hope that this rates its socks off. Or at least well enough to hang around for a long, long while.