MasterChef mixes it with the media

In the first year of MasterChef Australia, when it rose from sleeper show to hit series, it enjoyed a veritable honeymoon with the media. It was the hot show every journalist was happy to write about.

Last year there was a shift as the media began to deconstruct the show. There was that ‘plating up scandal’, the outrage over Marion being evicted, protests about returning contestants and Matt Preston’s theatrical smashing of a plate of food.

The audience has become wiser to the way the show is packaged. As Preston explains, dealing with the media is a bit of a tango.

“In the beginning you could tell people were doing the network favours. It was all, ‘If you really want to talk to Hugh Laurie about House you need to talk to one of the muppets from MasterChef first,'” he says.

“But what’s changed is that now you’re talking to a media about a show that they know and love. We could bullshit dramatically for the Series 1 launch because nobody knew what was going on or had high expectations.

“But now you’re dealing with something that they’re quite protective about.

“The media always want to know what’s new. So we have to be doubly clear about what we’re changing and why we’re changing it.”

The more successful the show became, the more Editors were keen to feature stories in newspapers, but that also brought an appetite, pardon the pun, for new angles.

“The media was swept along with the need to have a story about the show in the paper everyday because it was a phenomenon. And it was too hard a question to answer: ‘why has it been so successful?’,” Preston explains.

“We were in an Obama period of global change, where we were all in a warm and fuzzy post-GFC period. So we were definitely the underdog in series 1, but in series 2 we started to be a bit of a tall poppy.

“But transparency is a really important thing for MasterChef. People want it to be taken seriously. They want to know that they’re not wasting their time on something that has been pre-ordained who will win.

“We were lucky in a way with series 2 with Marion because the challenge that she was eliminated in was a Thai Satay and the sauce, which obviously wasn’t the best, showed the validity of the show. But what would have been really worrying was if she had nailed the satay sauce and won there would have been suspicion that she had been given the challenge because she was half-Thai and therefore it was to keep in a favourite. So the conspiracists were left with nowhere to go with that result.”

As the show has boomed so too has the conversation on Twitter, internet forums and blogs, Preston says media and social media are key ways to get a sense of where the audience is moving and what the opinion-formers are feeling about the show. Indeed social media was where the ‘plating up’ scandal was born.

“It was a punter on Twitter who took screenshots of the two plates. And that’s the changing face of the media now. So much of what we read, even in my newspaper as much as anyone else’s, is being generated by what’s been said on Twitter,” he says.

“So I knew the plate thing was going to be a subject for discussion.

“But the whole thing in those situations is to put your hand up and say ‘this is what happens… ice cream will melt.’

“Analysis is really good. It’s fantastic to know that level of analysis there. It means you’ve always got to be doing the right thing, because people will find out. That’s the nature of the media these days.”

MasterChef Australia airs 7:30pm Sunday – Friday on TEN.