Chef!
Yesterday I finished watching my entire new Chef! DVD collection. I was able to appreciate the first 2 seasons much more with the improved quality – the food actually looked like food and the laughing didn’t overpower the dialogue like it did on the VHS version so I was able to get a handful of new jokes. The third season I had never seen before so that was all new to me.
I was very upset that they had recast Gustav, Jeff Nuttall did a great job but his interpretation of the character was essentially a new character. Ian McNeice, the original Gustav, wasn’t a quick-witted wise-cracking kind of character – his early interactions with Chef were so funny largely because of this. I think Jeff Nuttall should have just been a new character; they only made use of the Gustav back-story for one joke in the entire season anyways. Why couldn’t they get Ian McNeice back? They got the guest star that played Gareth’s father back for pete’s sake!
At first I totally hated Savannah, her voice was irritating and her character was more of a caricature, as the series progressed she became somewhat more three dimensional but I don’t know if she ever overcame the original gimmick of her character. One thing that made Lucinda great in the first season was that she was a fairly normal person – the strength of Chef! was in the reality of it, Savannah was a cartoon character by comparison. Chef! simply wasn’t that kind of sitcom, it was something better and deserved a better character.
I had read online about the Janice-divorce plotline and was concerned that this would be done poorly, that they’d boot her off in the first episode of the season and then forget about her but thankfully they handled that story very well – it was an arc plot throughout the season and after two seasons of the arc story being financial difficulties this was a refreshing change. As someone who has to manage an ever-decreasing budget at work I’d rather not come home to endless plotlines about budget cuts.
The ending reminded me of Sex & The City in a way but the acting just fell apart in the last few scenes – and having an imaginary sequence in the final episode when you’ve never done one before was jarring and a poor choice in my opinion. The final resolution of the characters however was excellent – they put all the toys back in the toy box in good condition when they were done playing with them…now if only someone would open the toy box again.
Overall the complete series of Chef! is a great entertainment investment, on excellent crazy sale from Amazon or not. I highly recommend it.
