Is Gordon Ramsay America’s Daddy?

The High Low looks at all the ways Gordon Ramsay might actually be Gordon Daddy: TV Chef Daddy of America

Does America want a spanking once in a while?

Is America a bit of masochist, a bit of a fetishist for pain, a bit of a Roman Roy to Gordon Ramsay’s Gerri Killman?

Are we, as a people, fundamentally in need of punishment because our puritan forefathers (there’s that word again) successfully imbued all our physical desires with crippling shame?

The High Low addresses all the ways in which Gordon yells at us – and then, importantly, encourages us – and why he might be on prime time television more than any other personality in America.

In 2014, 8.07% of All PrimeTime Television Offered a Gordon Ramsay Show

That’s a true stat.

A quick breakdown.

2014 was the year it appears Gordon Ramsay had peak saturation in the American Daddy Market:

• Hell’s Kitchen (since 2005)
• MasterChef (since 2010)
• Kitchen Nightmares (2007-2014)
• Hotel Hell (2012-2016)
• MasterChef Junior (since 2013)
• F Word (2017)
• 24 Hrs to Hell and Back (since 2018)

According to Neilsen,”traditional primetime is eight to 11 o’clock at night, Monday through Friday”.

This means there are (3 hours of primetime per weekday, 5 weekdays per week, 52 weeks per year) 780 concurrent hours of prime time television in a given year.

And in 2014 Gordon Ramsay had the following shows, taking up the following amount of hours:

• Hell’s Kitchen
  • 20 episodes = 20 hours
    • Rating Avg.: 4.834
    • Low: 4.17, High: 5.45

• MasterChef
  • 19 episodes = 19 hours 
    • Rating Avg.: 5.197 (10 episodes w/ no rating data on wikipedia)
    • Low: 4.26, High: 5.83

• Kitchen Nightmares
  • 9 Episodes = 9 hours (usually a 15 episode season)
    • No rating info on Wikipedia

• Hotel Hell
  • 8 episodes = 8 hours
    • Rating Avg.: 3.72
    • Low: 2.41, High: 4.06

• MasterChef Junior
  • 7 episodes = 7 hours
    • Rating Avg.: 4.81
    • Low: 4.06 High: 5.61

That’s a total of 63 hours, or 8.07% of the entire, yearly amount of possible primetime TV hours.

Now, Of Course…

Now, of course

• there are hundreds of channels and so you could argue the amount of prime time television should be 580 * 200,000 channels
• the game show network runs 100 hours of Steve Harvey every single day
• Seinfeld is on repeat 1,046 hours of every single day
• there is the general, waning importance of primetime television in the internet age (but as far as remnants of the hegemony, primetime TV is as good of a cultural barometer as we’re likely to get).

None of these straw-man arguments change the fact that

• in 2014, Gordon Ramsay was an option 1 out of every 12 hours of Primetime American television.

I venture to guess, that in the 2010’s, there hasn’t been another person who has been on primetime television as much as Gordon Ramsay.

The only personalities that might compete are on shows that have multiple episodes per week:

• News anchors are on 30-60 minutes per night, only in prime time on cable networks, only on one show, and have a similar drawback (for their host) as game show hosts:
• They are on vehicles which rely less on their personality than every one of Gordon’s shows.
• Late night hosts are just that, late at night.

Actors on scripted shows can only appear full-time on one show at a time, giving them only 1 possible hour per week to be beamed into an American home.

What Does It Take To Be a Daddy?

While being one of SNL’s best skits of last season, Westminster Daddy Show also goes along way in explaining what a daddy is:

• “Think George Clooney but attainable”
• “Any man can be a father but it takes a hot, middle-aged guy with a big job to be a daddy”

If there’s any one person who hits both of those nails on the head, and is on primetime television more than anyone else, it’s Gordon Ramsay (your personal perceptions of hotness aside).

But, that’s not all it takes to be a daddy, and it doesn’t explain all of Gordon Ramsay’s appeal.

Why is Gordon Ramsay’s approach to being a leader so fulfilling to so many viewers that the market seems to think we want near-endless spin-offs and iterations of the Ramsay reality brand?

For the deeper psychological importance and implications of Daddies, I turn to renowned scholar and professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of Berkeley since 1972, George Lakoff and his 2016 article, “Why Trump?”, which sought to explain why Americans were starting to rally behind the, then-not-yet-Republican-nominee, Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. Bolding my own,

What do social issues and the politics have to do with the family? We are first governed in our families, and so we grow up understanding governing institutions in terms of the governing systems of families.

We have founding fathers. We send our sons and daughters to war. We have homeland security.

The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative).

The Strict Ramsay: Come Here, Get Out

To most people, when they think of Gordon Ramsay, they probably think of the Strict Father.

The Strict Father…when his children disobey, it is his moral duty to punish them painfully enough so that, to avoid punishment, they will obey him (do what is right) and not just do what feels good. 

The contestants, and by some existing or possibly not-existing extension, us the audience, are Gordon Ramsay’s children.

When a wannabe chef on Masterchef undercooks a filet, we look forward to Ramsay’s inevitable and ineffable verbal evisceration of that wannabe.

Gordon is yelling at someone else, but during any one of his many yelling fits, he could trigger memories of us being reprimanded by our father. Or if our fathers were distant, we get to live vicariously through Gordon’s chef children whom he yells at.

Only, when its a TV chef yelling at TV contestants, it’s easier to deal with.

We can distance ourselves from the verbal anger (so as to save our own ego and sense of well-being) while simultaneously reliving a very intense part of our upbringing in a relatively safe way.

Ramsay’s outbursts also give us – in many ways that the real world does not – a sense of justice, a clear definition of right and wrong, with wrong being appropriately, or often overly, punished.

At one point (insult #30) in the clip above, Gordon even asks, about an expensive piece of meat apparently ruined by unskilled cooks, “what are you gonna do? Get daddy to buy you a new one?”.

Well, Gordon, I am guessing by your tone that you won’t be buying us a new one.

Time after time, in clip after clip, Gordon puts chef after chef in their place with verbal punishment, so that “to avoid punishment, they will obey him”.

Now there is certainly schadenfreude and some level of catharsis in watching Gordon get to say to his co-workers what we wish we could say to ours in times of frustration.

But why is that cathartic? Why do we want people punished, at what feels at times, like such a fundamental level?

Lakoff, again:

The strict father logic extends further. The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality (the strict father version), and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be (and traditionally has been) a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate. 

An outsider to both countries in which Ramsay might be the pre-eminent TV Chef Daddy, a Canadian writing in The National Post had this to say about the difference between British Gordon and American Gordon:

The trouble is that Ramsay was never the fuming madman the American networks made him out to be.…You’d never know it were you familiar with him from the show’s America iteration, but in the United Kingdom, Ramsay is exceptionally charismatic, even charming.

Now I’m sure Gordon Ramsay has yelled at a few United Kingdom citizens, but this comparison of the varying musical compositional choices between the two versions doesn’t bode well for the “just as nice and calm in America” argument.

Whether or not Gordon turns up the masochism for Americans, doesn’t change the fact that we like watching him yell at people, a lot.

Lakoff, in “Why Trump?”, explains the conservative view and how it stems from a Strict Father worldview.

I would also argue (and perhaps he does, I can’t claim to be an Lakoff expert) that, to a varying extent, both points of view exist within one person.

We all – either a little, or a lot – desire the Nurturant Parent and we all – to varying degrees – expect the Strict Father.

The Nurturant Ramsay: As American As Apple Pie

While our most indelible impression of Gordon Ramsay is one of a tyrant yelling at his peons, none of his shows would work if he wasn’t also supportive and at times, even downright sweet.

One example is probably the most go-to clip in all Masterchef history:

Christina is blind. She has baked an Apple Pie, that she thinks, “looks like rubbish”.

Ramsay says, “it looks stunning”.

All of America wells up.

“Stop doubting yourself, be bold”.

America reaches for its collective Kleenex’s.

“You’ve got to start believing in yourself more”

America shoots its teary load.

If you watch this clip without feeling emotion, well, you probably fought in one of America’s ongoing 18-year wars and are hardened by the experience in an understandable, but still tragic, way.

Ramsay does this comfort thing at least once an episode it seems, always harping on the need for self-belief, and the uselessness of self-doubt.

Is this just the Strict Father but with positive reinforcement? Possibly.

But I think Gordon Ramsay fulfills a role in American life that appears contradictory at first glance, but because of that apparent contradiction, is all the more satisfying to our daddy-needing souls:

1. He yells and he comforts.
2. He’s from Britain, a country that could legitimately – in the language of familial nationality – be called America’s Daddy.
3. He is a man that cooks, which – much like the double standard that asserts women should cook in the home and men should cook on the job (head chef being, historically, a man’s job) – satisfies our daddy needs by being both Strict Father who makes sure our food if cooked good and also the Nurturant Parent who makes us good food to eat.

If you don’t agree with any of this, well, I think Gordon Ramsay might agree with you, even going so far as to say that all my writing about him: