Ropes Kitchen

Nothing is real on TV, believe me. However, to update it, I should say: “Whatever you see on a screen, it’s not real”. Trust me, I’ve worked in the media since my early twenties. And, all things considered, I can tell you that eleven out of ten things you see on your screen are fake. That’s right, that’s how I said it: eleven out of ten. And from all the things I could tell you about, today I want to tell you about Ropes Kitchen.

Let me begin by saying that the media is a weird place. You can rip somebody’s guts out in full color and no one’s going to complain. Or you can shoot two hundred rounds of ammunition, and that’s fine. But if you show three girls wearing thongs, most of the audience is going to ask for your head. They’ll do even if they actually enjoyed seeing those girls. And if you kill a puppy on screen, well, you’d be better off dead.

That’s why nobody expected that cooking show from hell to succeed. I mean, you have a guy with the face of a Shar Pei dog and an obnoxious accent being mean to men, women, and whatever gets in his way. And it turns out that it is one of the most successful shows in recent history!

With that in mind, I pitched the idea of something similar to the top executives of the network where I was working at the time. That’s the second rule: there’s nothing original on TV; it’s all plagiarized from somewhere else.

My idea was for a show titled Rope’s Kitchen. We would bring one of the best rope masters, and he would ask his pupils to do scenes. The scenes would become more complex and difficult with each episode. I guess the world is not ready for rope games on screen yet because they all turned it down.

You can have brains coming out of people’s heads, but you cannot have a rigger showing how to do a suspension on screen. And that’s regardless of how artistic or sexy it may be.

This is the story about Ropes Kitchen.