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Answer by Sabrina Ali, fan of Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef:
Hell’s Kitchen is a brutal, schadenfreude-inducing show, while MasterChef is more or less a feel-good show.
Hell’s Kitchen contestants endure devastating beatdowns at every turn. First, they’re generally portrayed as some combination of backstabbing, sleazy, rude, arrogant, or incompetent, so we the audience are primed to enjoy the brutality and insults that come their way. Then they are subjected to humiliating punishments such as having to drink scallop shakes and eat lamb testicles when they lose challenges.
But most importantly, during the dinner service (the main competition event of each episode), they are shouted at and beaten down by Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen. Ramsay plays the villain on the show, hurling plates of food into the trash and getting into the contestants’ faces and screaming at them.
So it’s no surprise the contestants can’t finish dinner service; they’re set up to fail. It wouldn’t be Hell’s Kitchen if everything went smoothly and the chefs were successful. The whole point of the show is to watch them get destroyed.
Compare that to MasterChef—while Hell’s Kitchen is a grueling ordeal that chefs have to endure, MasterChef is more like a difficult but educational journey for the home cooks, the opportunity of a lifetime to learn from industry greats and prove their skills. The home cooks on the show are also portrayed as at least moderately likable and relatable, save for the season’s couple of misfits and bullies.
Most importantly, MasterChef is clearly meant to cast a more positive light on Gordon Ramsay, who acts as a mentor and teacher on the show, rather than the caricature of a drill sergeant that he is on Hell’s Kitchen. Ramsay seems to want the cooks on MasterChef to succeed, as does the show’s audience. So of course, they do succeed—they generally finish their tasks, and there are far fewer epic failures than there are on Hell’s Kitchen.
Finally, Hell’s Kitchen is oriented around teams, while MasterChef is oriented around individuals. On Hell’s Kitchen, the contestants are split into two teams at the beginning of the season and compete as teams until late in the competition. On the other hand, MasterChef features a mix of individual and team challenges, and the teams are different for each challenge.
This dynamic matters because it’s much more dramatic to show a whole team on Hell’s Kitchen imploding and getting summarily expelled from the kitchen than it is to show a random home cook failing to finish a task on MasterChef. And when there are team challenges on MasterChef, Ramsay is more of a facilitator than he is an obstacle: He generally tries to get the cooks through the challenge rather than look for ways to shut them down.
Why do Hell’s Kitchen chefs have a hard time finishing a service, but home cooks on MasterChef have less trouble? originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:
