feel like people making these kind of reality shows lately are missing the most important part of what made Iron Chef a good show: you get to watch the host take a big chomp out of a bell pepper like it's an apple and then look directly at the camera

Let's not forget the very important and cool way that he just bites into a pepper in the intro

In other words, the worst part of reality tv is the "reality" part. Give me kayfabe or give me death!

Taskmaster gets this. Greg is a petty, nigh-impotent noble and Alex is his terrible ferret of an assistant/sub/life-partner. They sit in thrones (Greg's is bigger) and assign their contestants ridiculous and cruel tasks delivered in fancy wax-sealed form. It's basically a more fraught Iron Chef if instead of making food with weird ingredients you have to get a potato into a bucket (and sometimes also make food with weird ingredients).

I want one of the competitions to have a roman gladiatorial Colosseum theme, even if it's for a hobby like crocheting.

"Gladys, both consuls have given the thumbs down to your porcelain pony. You will be fed to a lion, and you will not be advancing to the next round."

I think another thing that made it incredibly special that modern competition reality shows just can't live up to is that nobody in its run time ever broke kayfabe. No one ever acknowledged that the fancy Prince was just an actor, or that the "magnificent stadium" that he built was just stay sound stage, every contestant played along with the elaborate reasoning behind why they should have a grudge match against a particular iron chef, even though it had all been scheduled weeks ahead. It was a lot like tokosatu shows and that it didn't try and be cool, or treat its own silliness as something to be embarrassed about, it was just openly and unabashedly itself, fully silly and fully enthusiastic

The Japanese Iron Chef with Kaga is so, so underrated.