9 TVs
by Thinus Ferreira
The fourth season of the revived MasterChef South Africa on M-Net (DStv 101) starting on Monday 28 February at 18:00 isn't a leftover, frozen TV dinner that's a reheat-and-eat but a meticulous meal mixed and baked from scratch, precisely according to the recipe, with a terrific television taste.
Taken over by Homebrew Films after eight years, with a new season of the Banijay-format that was filmed in late-2021 at Makers Landing at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, the sizzling new season of MasterChef SA is - to borrow an advertising phrase - too fresh too flop.
The expertise and meticulous TV stitching of Homebrew Films - that found success with local kykNET cooking competition series like Koekedoor, Kokkedoor and Kokkedoortjie - is all over the new season of MasterChef SA, from the editing and sound, to the careful camerawork, angles and directing, the warm set design and production design, as well as the studio lighting.
With MasterChef SA season 4, series director Sanet Olivier has once again created impressive, masterpiece television that's TV export quality.
The revived MasterChef SA is simultaneously extremely accessible to DStv subscribers who are not into food preparation and who can't cook, and also lovingly indulgent and aspirational.
You want to dream that you have access to a Pick n Pay pantry over-flowing with food abundance in your own home, while the amber glow of recessed lighting and brown wood panelling exudes an aura of "calm, exclusive airport lounge" - albeit one filled with sweating contestants whisking, baking, mixing, cutting and peeling against time.
The MasterChef SA group of South African contestants are wonderfully diverse with great backstories unfolding - as a viewer you're guaranteed to find one or two you're rooting for from the first episode.
M-Net and MasterChef SA - even during a Covid-pandemic - managed to assemble a wonderful group of contestants from across South Africa as a cross-section of the country's real people standing behind the stove, better than what several other shows managed to put forth during this time.
As judges, Zola Nene, Gregory Czarnecki and Justine Drake work well together although Zola is definitely the food school teacher chatterbox (not a bad thing by any means) - both loving and slightly stern in equal measure and very prominent as the glue holding the foodie threesome eye-spies together.
With uncertain real-world times, MasterChef SA is fantasy reality television - an escapism TV smorgasbord to be savoured and enjoyed at the bottom of a set of double escalators leading down into another magical meal-making world.
Even if you can only make toast with cheese you want to be in this kitchen. You want to look at dozens of hands racing against time to make meals from ingredients in Mystery Boxes. You want to see who gets praise. You want to see who can manage to somehow disguise a culinary disaster and make it through yet another episode.
Sanet Olivier, in conjunction with the extremely smart - and almost "deviously smart" - content directors Jana Kuhn, Michal Malek and Monde Sibisi bring the DStv viewer absolutely everything: the tears, the trembling lower lips; the split-second "hidden moments" of emotion betraying contestants' true inner feelings and motivations.
MasterChef SA is South African television's new hour that brims with abundance - an abundance of food, an abundance of creativity, an abundance of emotion, a profusion of interesting people making interesting choices, and an ongoing daily collection of great endorphin-releasing moments of challenge and triumph that packs a punch.
With exquisite attention to the details, the Homebrew Films cooks elevated the television broth: M-Net has plated an immeasurably watchable fourth season of MasterChef SA that's high-quality, mass media reality TV art.
MasterChef SA season 4 is on M-Net at 18:00 from Mondays to Thursdays, starting 28 February
