Welcome to Thanks, I Love It, our series highlighting something onscreen we’re obsessed with this week.
Pick an art form, any art form. There’s a reality competition series about it. Painters had World of Art, glassblowers have Blown Away, tattooists had Ink Master, cooks and musicians have literally dozens of options, Lego builders have Lego Master, and so the list goes on. All of these competitions follow the same basic format. A group of talented people in their given medium battle it out over a series of challenges to determine who at the end of the show is the “best” painter/glassblower/tattooist/chef/cook/singer/Lego builder, and that person wins a grand and lucrative prize.
While these competition shows are entertaining in their own right, the format could use an overhaul. As they stand, the losers are always determined by an audience vote or the discernment of a group of judges, and their journeys are forgotten in favor of the final result. In these shows, only the winner gets to reap the rewards of having competed in the first place, which is kind of played out considering the sheer number of shows that follow the formula. Enter: Netflix’s School of Chocolate.
School of Chocolate is a reality competition show that resists the played-outness of previous shows by acknowledging that each competitor is light years away from being as good as the show’s host. That host is chef Amaury Guichon, the internet famous chocolate sculpturist who makes remarkably lifelike chocolate creations and other fantastical desserts. Chef Amaury is a game changer in the world of chocolate sculpting because of his unusual and creative techniques, like using a bucket and saran wrap to create perfect sugar domes or fortifying taller sculptures with load-bearing hollow chocolate cylinders. Many of his techniques are secret, which gave him an advantage in the field until he decided to share his secrets with a selected class of up-and-coming pastry chefs.
Calling the chefs in School of Chocolate competitors is a bit of a misnomer. There is a winner and a prize at the end, but the winner isn’t the last person standing after everyone else has been eliminated. The winner is determined by a class grading standard — he or she who grasps chef Amaury’s lessons and applies them creatively through a series of group and individual challenges. There are no eliminations because everyone is there to learn, and even those who don’t win walk away with a master’s passed-down knowledge of how to improve their craft. It’s a refreshing and positive spin on reality cooking shows that focuses on the love of the craft over anything else.
In an early episode of school of chocolate, one competitor with less formal training than the others fails to deliver a complete dessert for a challenge. In any other show, showing up with almost nothing would at best garner an instant ticket off the show and at worst be cause for humiliation, but in School of Chocolate it becomes a special opportunity for chef Amaury to excuse the competitor from the next challenge and give them a private lesson. When he does judge his students, his commentary is honest (“this cake makes me feel sad”), but he’s never mean and almost always cuts his critique with tips on how to do better next time.
School of Chocolate‘s focus on positive growth while still encouraging competition doesn’t make for the most dramatic cooking show on TV, but it does set a new standard that future competitions should emulate to bring the genre forward into the new decade. After all, we could all stand for less yelling, more teaching, fewer discouraging failures, and more chocolate pterodactyls.
School of Chocolate is now streaming on Netflix.