Brandon Handy

Season 1 was amazing! I really feel like it was unicorn. It only needed a couple of tweaks regarding the host. It felt like the host didn’t have a whole lot to do, marking them basically irrelevant. The format of the show was excellent though. In my opinion, season 2 is a perfect example of how producers tend to over correct, pushing the show into mediocrity. The glory of season 1 was in that they really let the skills and the mastery of the participants shine. The judges would assign what the participants were to cook, and they would let them go. Most of the participants are not trained chefs. They are individuals competing on the BBQ circuit using their own method's. In season 2, they not only assign what the participants cook, but HOW they cook it. There are two main problems with the new format. By telling the participants how to cook, you don’t let their skills and techniques shine. A large part of this show for many viewers is seeing what these pit masters do and how they do it, so the audience can learn from them. For the entirety of season 2 we hear, “the trench, the trench, the trench.” This gets repetitive and boring, kind of like when a child gets a new toy and wants to play with that one toy all the time. There is even one episode where they lock up their smokers and give them literal trash to cook on. The second problem with telling the participants how to cook is it sets them up for failure. This is disappointing for the viewer because people want to see people eliminated based on their skills and performance, not because you gave them a filing cabinet to smoke a piece of meat in, and they failed. Overall, season 2, while getting the needed host improvements, provided a big disappointment with its constricted format and repetitive dictation of cooking techniques. It fell into the Hollywood trap of trying to make things overly complicated by placing unnecessary elements into the show. Unfortunately, this show has been debased into yet another formulaic cooking show, with kitschy gimmicks, that will go on to die in a grave yard of low quality Netflix productions.