Series The Best Worst Show I've Ever Seen
Mystery Diners is not a good show. Mystery Diners may well be one of the cheapest, lazily-produced shows I've ever seen, and I once sat through a whole episode of 2 Broke Girls. But Mystery Diners is also incredibly entertaining for a wide variety of reasons.
The first and foremost reason is that it's fake. It's obviously - and I mean really obviously - fake. And I don't mean a Hell's Kitchen kind of fake where you occasionally get the hint that a conversation was cut down or clips were edited together for Rule of Drama; I mean they make up entire episodes from scratch. And that's what makes Mystery Diners so incredible. They could not care less that you know it's fake, they just do whatever they think will be entertaining. And it turns out, fake entertainment is really easy to make! And funny, too!
Do you want to see a boring twenty minute program where it turns out the problem is that the food is overpriced, or the wait staff are a little unenthusiastic? Or do you want to see the Mystery Diners bust in and solve problems like 'My head baker is throwing a wedding cake at customers and through my windows!' and 'Five drunk men just drove a golf cart into the lake of my private club!'? It's wonderful! Why bother staging things in boring, minor ways like other faux-reality TV shows do when you can go the whole nine yards and make up something crazy?
A lot of the humour comes from how obvious it is that nothing is genuine. One sting takes place at an establishment that serves meals to dog-owners and their dogs, and of course they attach a bug to a dog-collar, and of course the head chef inexplicably walks over to the dog and pets it for about two minutes, solely so that the bug can pick up the incredibly incriminating conversation he's having on the phone. The dog even gets its own 'Undercover Agent' screen in the run-down of the 'operation', complete with serious image in profile. You wouldn't get material like this from Gordon Ramsay, would you?
That's not to say there aren't flaws. A minor one is that a the beginning of each episode there's a minute of the restaurant owner talking about how wonderful their place is, how amazing the food is, and how unusual it is for them to have a problem in the first place. I don't mind the shameless self-promotion (there has to be some reason they agree to do the show,) but sometimes the Food Porn succeeds in making me hungry, which is a problem because it's normally on TV quite late at night, leading to several 11:30pm inquiries as to whether Papa John's is still open or not. (It is.)
I'm mildly aware that there are people out there who don't realise the show is fake, but there are also people out there who watch Thunderf00t videos and don't think Rollercoaster Tycoon is very good, so that's nothing new. For now, Mystery Diners is my greatest televised guilty pleasure. Tommy Wiseau would be proud.
Series Not so much real life as reconstruction?
How much of this show is actual as-it-happens footage and how much is reconstructed after the event using actors and a tight script? It just seems too neat and clean to be wholly plausible. And even the people shown up as on the take or crooked must have a right to refuse to allow their footage to be used - it's not as if they've been tried and found guilty in a court of law, after all. How often are their parts played by actors in a reconstruction filmed later? And the bosses/owners sometimes tend to show themselves up as being ethically dubious - Gordon Ramsay, for instance, or Robert Irvine would instantly call them on this. Here, Stiles gives them a bye and glosses over their failings. the automatic presumption appears to be owner = automatically a put-upon honest hard-working angel; all employees = lazy idle incompetent feckless thieving scum. Morality fables artfully presented - nobody with a brain thieves from the till or nicks from the stock as it tends to get noticed. And it's mean. But - ultimately unconvincing. Loved the one where the flaky wedding-cake maker went postal and completely lost it, though! I've worked in kitchens and THAT bit is, if anything, underplayed. Anyone with experience in the biz has seen as bad.