Knives out: What ‘Top Chef’ and Simon Cowell are doing for the culture
What these judges do is no substitute for an essay or even a full-length review devoted to a single movie, book, or painting. But it’s enlightening in a new way. These shows present something we haven’t really seen before: criticism in action. They consider food, clothes, singing, stardom — stuff we’ve always just consumed — and give us a set of tools to think about them, even evaluate them for ourselves. The marriage of highbrow criticism and lowbrow TV, it turns out, is a powerful thing.