On occasion, if it’s a particularly compelling season, I really enjoy Top Chef. I’ve written here in the past about how much I also liked Top Chef Masters, because it’s a pleasure to watch talented people do something well. For those reasons, and also because I have been known to pull out a KitchenAid mixer on the weekends, I was really looking forward to the latest in the franchise, Top Chef: Just Desserts. Pastry chefs! Stupid title pun! Sounds good!

I’ve tried to give it a few episodes, but Just Desserts is exactly what I was hoping it wouldn’t be. I’m a girl, and I like to bake, and I was hoping that some of the machismo of the Top Chef aesthetic would elevate my hobby to a serious, challenging, not-quite-so-femme profession. The main Top Chef is full of slow-mo shots of very sharp knives puncturing brightly colored fruits, lots of crisp blue, silver and orange tones, and its kitchens are full of people barking at each other, often to the tune of “there’s no crying in the kitchen!” This is not to say that it’s a firmly hetero reality show – it’s on Bravo, for pete’s sake. But Top Chef seems most comfortable with a fairly butch style of queerness, and while this no doubt suggests some obvious and problematic connotations between masculinity and seriousness, this is just what I was looking for in a reality show full of cupcakes, pink frosting, and (ack!) chocolate.

So I turn on Top Chef: Just Desserts and am first confronted with the words “Just Desserts” rendered in glossy, chocolate colored cursive font underneath the familiar logo. Next we get cupcakes, bananas, and other similarly cute foods rendered in neon shapes in the background – these aren’t so bad, except that it seems like everything on the show has to be explicitly dessert themed. The contestants live in a house with pink and brown diagonal stripes painted on the walls, and I don’t remember being hit over the head with adorable themed décor on regular Top Chef. Okay, so the styling isn’t great, but what about the actual competition? It’s hard not to read into the locations and challenges offered to Top Chef versus Just Desserts, even though some it must be due to Top Chef’s well-established pedigree. Still – Top Chef contestants go to NASA. Just Desserts contestants go to a fog machine heavy “Mad Max meets Cirque du Soleil” aerialist performance from an unknown troupe of wacky theater people wearing bondage and burlesque themed outfits.

It turns out, there’s also lots of crying on Top Chef: Just Desserts. We’re just four episodes in, and there have already been too many weeping jags, mental breakdowns, and hissy fits to count. Almost every contestant is either too sensitive to put together a plate of food, or requires seventeen dramatic outbursts to bake a cake, and this emotional frailty cross all boundaries of gender and sexual orientation. Even worse, instead of the countless declarations of how much the competition means to them and how ambitious and driven they all are, Just Desserts is plagued by contestants who sort of wish they were somewhere else. No one’s blaming a parent who misses his children or sons and daughters who worry about their families’ health, but the spin here is markedly different. If you miss your children on Top Chef, you say, “I can’t believe how hard it is to be away from my son, but he’s the fire that keeps me here, and reminds me how strong I need to be.” When you miss your children on Just Desserts, or the competition stresses you, you collapse and then offer yourself up for elimination. The conclusion is clear and straightforward: people who bake are teary, self-doubting wimps who like things that are pink, fussy, and easily damaged.

Sigh. Guess I’ll have to go back to Ace of Cakes or for my less gendered televised pastry needs.

Warning: In the paragraphs that follow, I reveal the winner of this season of Top Chef. If that bothers you, avert thine eyes and close this tab as quickly as possible.

Of course it had to be one of the Voltaggio brothers. The rivalry was too tempting and too entertaining, and to be fair to the producers of the show, they were both talented enough to justify whittling the competition down to a Cain and Abel situation (Romulus and Remus? Bert and Ernie?). I do feel bad for Kevin, though, who would have had an entirely different experience on that show if he weren’t up against a family dynamic that was built for reality television. As soon as they hit the finale, he must have known it would be one of the brothers, and the added bonus of being stuck with Preeti as his sous chef must have felt like the last nails in his coffin.

Watching this season of Top Chef, I began to realize just how much reality television relies on the family unit as a source of drama and narrative development. Even after you throw out explicitly family-based shows (Keeping up with the Kardashians, 18 Kids and Counting, either of the Hulk Hogan shows, Little Family, Big World, The Now-Deceased Show that Must Not Be Named), the useful and always-reliable family drama pervades almost every form of reality show. It’s the backbone of the whole Real Housewives series, but it also pops up consistently on competition shows like The Amazing Race and The Biggest Loser. Even America’s Next Top Model had a season where two of the top contestants were twins. So I guess the bigger surprise is that Top Chef hadn’t found a pair of sibling contestants several seasons ago.

They lucked out with the Voltaggios, though. Michael and Bryan were both driven, consistently high-performing chefs with completely different styles, and they managed to convey pleasure in each other’s success while also fighting hard to be the winner themselves. If I were producing a reality show, I can imagine two extremely talented brothers bickering over a piece of saran wrap feeling like a gift from the television gods. Even better, the final math of three contestants but only two moms would be impossible to refuse. I do have to admit, I backed the wrong brother and was totally rooting for Bryan. His restraint and maturity were far more appealing to me. But in the end…it was Michael, and that’s all right. In what is hopefully a sign of good, brotherly appreciation, they launched a Voltaggio Brothers website yesterday. We can only hope they’ve decided they’re more entertaining and effective as a family than they would be on their own.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about any reality television, which has been a conscious decision. I find myself wanting to write about NOT BELIEVING what Tyra DID this week on America’s Next Top Model or WOW is that one girl on The Biggest Loser SUPER ANNOYING OR WHAT? And this, I feel, does not usually make for the most insightful or enlightening reading material.

Despite that, one reality show I do watch regularly and like talking about is Bravo’s Top Chef. It has a lot of the characteristics that has made Project Runway a successful reality show in the past (although there are those who doubt its current quality): the participants are talented people who demonstrate passion for their chosen field, the competition is intense and appears challenging, and the show has garnered some respect from well-respected culinary icons. A reality show about cooking has a lot more credit when people like Eric Ripert, Jacques Pepin, Hubert Keller, Daniel Boulud, and Rick Bayless agree to be guest judges. The caliber of chefs on the show leads to a little bit of hero worship and contestants quake a little while serving the food, but it also leads to some amazing and devastating criticism. Which, of course, makes good television.

Top Chef kitchen at the M Resort, Jennifer begins to freak out over dinner service

This season has lived up to my Top Chef entertainment expectations. Several of the contestants appear truly talented, which makes the final outcome more difficult to predict (and more exciting to anticipate). The favorites are Kevin, Jennifer, and this season’s powerhouses, Michael and Bryan Voltaggio. Including a pair of brothers in the same season seemed at first like a classic reality show casting stunt. On a previous season, two women in a serious relationship were both cast, and it was just a matter of time before one went home and the drama began. Not so with the Voltaggios – as this season goes on, it has become clear they’re both extremely talented chefs with completely opposite personalities, and the result has been some great clashes in and out of the kitchen. This week’s episode was one of Top Chef’s favorite challenges, Restaurant Wars, where the contestants are divided into two teams and given a day to open a restaurant. Michael Voltaggio won the challenge with a chicken dish, but not before some snarky editing juxtaposed his feel good interviews (“I’m just a nice guy, you know?”) with footage of him in the kitchen (“F*ck, Bryan! No, I’ll fry ‘em myself, don’t touch ‘em”).

This Voltaggio brothers quarrel brought to you by the Glad family of products

With plenty of talented people to root for and more obscenity bleeps than an episode of Jerry Springer, this season of Top Chef has been consistently entertaining. Occasionally the incessant product placement feels particularly clunky (“Okay, guys, let’s go to the M Resort!”) or the drama appears unnecessarily staged, which is the only plausible theory about how Robin could still be around. Even then, it’s still fun to watch people who are really good at what they do take pleasure and competitive pride in doing something well.