Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution has failed. And that sucks ammonia-washed hamburger.
Oliver's truly revolutionary nutrition crusade was pulled by ABC in May, before its final episodes could even air. With only two remaining shows, the first of which airs Friday, Food Revolution's uncomfortable but often hilarious unmasking of pointless obesity, political machinations and crappy school menus has proven too real for even so-called reality television.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution broke out of the gate in its first season, scoring an Emmy award for Outstanding Reality Program. But after Oliver, a TED prize-winner for his nutrition-oriented show, successfully downsized a statistically unhealthy Huntington, West Virginia, the English chef and TV personality met with little more than brick walls when he got to Los Angeles for Season 2.
From unflinching resistance from the Los Angeles Unified School District, which refused to let him film in its schools, to blinkered blowback from the city's fast-food entrepreneurs, the second season of Food Revolution proved to be a Kafkaesque exercise in edible absurdity.
But Oliver will have the last laugh. Here are five reasons why Food Revolution will be remembered as funny as The Office, as serious as regime change, as horrific as torture porn, as metamocking as Spinal Tap and as essential as evolution.
Paging David Brent!
Food Revolution is where The Office meets Top Chef – if Top Chef was at the bottom of the food chain. Every week, Oliver bounds into work and quickly offends pretty much everyone around him. "Don't get arrested!" Oliver's daughter warns when daddy leaves for work.
Whether it's the the Los Angeles Unified School District that wants him gone or the administrators and students of West Adams High School that want him to stay – but have to endure phones-a-thons with lawyers and officials every time he shows up to class – Oliver comes off like Ricky Gervais' middle-management pariah David Brent.
Oliver's especially tragicomic when he partners up, Odd Couple-style, with a fast-food restaurant owner dead-set against changing his ways (above). Watching Oliver soldier forth to sell his crusade to the cameras, only to be met with blank stares or offended sensibilities, feeds Food Revolution's cognitive dissonance.
Food Torture Porn
How's this for horrorcore: In Episode 1, Oliver literally dissects how the food industry creates ground beef for the kids. He diagrams a live cow's choice cuts, mashes the throwaway bits usually reserved for dog and fast food, chuck thems into a washing machine, soaks them in ammonia and other toxic chemicals, and then offers a hearty bon appetit to his aghast audience. How you like them Rocky Mountain oysters?
In another riotous sequence, Oliver drowns an entire school bus in sugar to illustrate how much of the sweet stuff America's kids annually swallow in flavored milk. And let's not forget the year's worth of fast food he piles into one family's living room to make his point. It worked like a charm – after dad's gag reflex died down.
Regime Change, Baby!
Is Oliver a culinary terrorist? You'd have thought so, given the political stonewalling he got from the Los Angeles Unified School District board, especially superintendent Ramon Cortines. "I'm the chief administrative officer of this district," Cortines scolded when Oliver appeared before the board (witness the confrontation in the video above). "I made the decision that you will not be in our schools."
Not anymore, dude. Blowing through Cortines' obstinate blockage like bad beef, Oliver's persistence paid off when the school district replaced the superintendent with John Deasy. Deasy quickly mended fences with Oliver to save the school district's reputation, and started making Oliver's suggested changes to cafeteria menus. That's change you can believe in.
Metamockumentary
In each episode, Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution exhibits the sheer lunacy of, well, making each episode. It's like This Is Spinal Tap with diabetes, and Oliver's self-referential barbs are just as quotable.
My favorites? "Anyone would think that we're dealing with military secrets," a bewildered Oliver complains in the clip above. "We're doing a great show about people who don't give a fuck," he wisecracks in another. Unfortunately not anymore, my dear Mr. Oliver. Not anymore.
Adapt or Die!
"This is going to kill your children," the sunny optimist Oliver emphatically states in the Season 1 preview video above. It's not the type of thing hard-working parents want to hear about their kids' diets, at school or at home, and especially something they don't want to be told on television in front of millions. But it's true.
And that's the ultimate tragedy of ABC's decision to pull Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution: U.S. households need to watch this type of show far more than they need to watch Dancing With the Stars. After all, the first season won the studio an Emmy; the series, ratings aside, has changed cafeteria madness on either side of the continent.
As uncomfortable as it was to watch Oliver willingly bash his head against the wall every Friday, it was also very educational. American life expectancy has decreased relative to the 10 nations with the lowest mortality, thanks in part to escalating obesity and diabetes. And watching television itself might even kill you ahead of schedule. Perhaps that's really why ABC might smother Oliver's Food Revolution in its crib. We just can't handle its evolutionary truth.
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