To borrow his favourite catchphrase: Fuck Me, Gordon Ramsay’s new show sucks

Gordon Ramsay is wearing a wetsuit as he stands on the edge of a helicopter. Below him is the azure waters of the Cornwall coast, while on the beach in front of him, the 12 disciples wait with bated breath. They are nervous; they can’t believe what they’re seeing. Ramsay walks towards the edge of the helicopter and dives. A brief panic attack. He emerges from the water, shaking his hair like he’s James Bond. He walks to the beach, stands before the contestants and asks them to join him in taking a leap of faith.

No: this isn’t a biblical nightmare. This is Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars, the worst TV show of the swearing chef’s career.

Here’s why.

Gordon Ramsay is just a prop, but he’s also everywhere
Reviewing Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted, former Eater editor Greg Morabito concludes that the problem with the Gordon Ramsay show is that it’s none other than Gordon Ramsay himself. Unfortunately, so is Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars.

It may seem like a strange conclusion to draw when Ramsay is clearly the vehicle for the show—and that’s his £150,000, to invest in any food and drink entrepreneur who can overcome his crazy challenge. But he’s literally everywhere: he jumps out of helicopters into water; he makes contestants jump off cliffs into water; he eats toast; he gets angry about toast; he talks to local street food vendors; he sits in an interrogation room with each of the final four.

Compare this to The Apprentice. Alan Sugar is the Boss, but he doesn’t hover over every element of every challenge, rubbing his hands together, sending and deleting racist tweets, and commenting on every move. He announces the task, leaves for 40 minutes, and then eviscerates the moaning contestants in the conference room. Ramsay, here, is doing everything at once while actually doing very little, so frantically that it becomes very loud background noise. This also makes the scenes where he’s allowed to try to be funny, or even show a little personality—including asking someone if their hair is in a hat because it’s long and blue, lol!—feel uncomfortably forced.

The show itself is a terrible fusion dish
Speaking of The Apprentice, this show is a lot like The Apprentice. It’s also like Kitchen Nightmares, The F Word, and SAS Who Dares Wins at various points. Ramsay’s sheer force of personality and his way of making everything, sound, weirdly important could have brought this together if he had been allowed to be more energetic, but as it is, it hasn’t.

That puts the onus on the contestants. They do their fair share of punch, with some strong confessions (Asher, on Vincenzo’s overzealous take on some stingrays: “To be honest, it’s all bullshit”) and some pretty aggressive bickering between Valentina and Victoria over some mushrooms. But really, there’s not much they can do with a show that’s gone from jumping off a cliff for no real reason to cooking on a beach for the public, with some documentary-style footage thrown in for good measure. Next week’s preview of fish being deboned before a festival cook-off, so it doesn’t look like things will get any less chaotic.

Why did the executives force viewers to watch this hybrid version of Gordon?
Ramsay’s appearance as a reincarnated TV host is a little puzzling. For much of his TV career, he has played two roles: Gordon Ramsay, the chef, or Gordon Ramsay, the caricature of Gordon Ramsay the chef. The former leans on his expertise when judging Masterchef Australia, or swearing at a dorky restaurateur on Kitchen Nightmares; the latter leans on his old understanding of the chef-as-fierce-rockstar, when judging Masterchef Australia, or swearing at a dorky restaurateur on Kitchen Nightmares.

There’s a small, instructive moment when contestant Matthew serves Ramsay some salt-and-pepper chicken wings to try, and the chef spits them out. Ramsay’s viewers have seen it all before: the nervous chef, the dramatic pause, the spitting disgust. But this time, Matthew already knows it’s bad: he’s just told Ramsay it’s too salty. In this context, the spitting feels forced, even fake—as if he’s forced to do it, because that’s what Gordon Ramsay does.

This moment reinforces the fact that on this show, and more recently on Uncharted and Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance, Ramsay is someone else: a regular host. He’s still there because he’s famous, and people recognize him accordingly, but he’s not really Gordon Ramsay most of the time. Like Ul