Markus_Beer

Whenever the story is with Freeman, the series is great. But the supporting characters make it hard to really love The Responder. Marco, for example, has been borrowed directly from Scooby-Doo: he's portrayed as such a comically stupid comic-relief character that you get whiplash from the tonal shift of his scenes. Likewise, Rachel, the partner of Freeman's Chris, is somewhat bizarre in her development towards the last third of the series.

It is this inconsistency that has somewhat spoiled this high quality series for me: Chris's life feels real, the lives of most of the supporting characters feel like made-up stories.

A platform of ingredients is lowered over three floors, from a state-of-the-art kitchen to a standard industrial kitchen down to a nicely decorated basement hole with hardly any cooking tools. With five contestants per level, those at the bottom must cook with the leftovers left by the two teams above them. This is very reminiscent of the film "The Platform" (El Hoyo, ESP 2019, D: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia), only without the sharp social criticism, it is after all a Gordon Ramsay game show.

Unfortunately, at least to a degree, because the style of "Hell's Kitchen" or "Masterchef USA" can also be found here: very fast cuts, plastic orchestral music from the computer, and the focus here is clearly on the drama of contestants under time pressure, all wonderfully consumed by their ambitions and egos, while the food itself, on the other hand, is not that important.

Although the pace and action is still enjoyable, I sometimes wish for the return of Ramsay's much more relaxed edited Euro productions, where the camera lingers for a while to give the viewer a chance to be absorbed by what's going on. But alright, you can't have everything. Here it's all about breathless action in the kitchen, spiced up with little details from the private lives of the candidates, whose names you won't remember anyway at this early stage.

The basic idea is interesting and you can be sure from which source the producers got their inspiration, but after the first episode the show looks like solid, albeit very familiar feeling entertainment.