1) Nobody measures anything. All ingredients are pre-prepared and preset for use in recipes, a form of mise en place, that is never explained, never shown being prepared, never indicated as a professional kitchen shortcut.
Back in the day, by contrast, Julia Child measured everything. She even sifted her flour! Something unheard of these days.
2) Everyone uses only Kitchen Aid stand mixers and Cuisinart food processors. If another brand creeps in (as sometimes happens in early episodes of a particular cooking show) they will be replaced with the official brands shortly.
3) Everyone sprinkles salt and pepper and other dry seasonings with their fingers from on high; no one ever uses a salt or pepper shaker under any circumstances.
4) Related: Only kosher or sea salt is ever used, never iodized table salt. Black pepper is always "freshly ground" even though it may be pulled by the fingers full from a dish like the kosher/sea salt.
5) Herbs are almost always fresh cut like flowers from the garden. Dried herbs are rarely seen let alone used, but when they are, they are almost always from some artisinal outfit, never from a commonly known commercial spice company. Ever!
6) Primary cooking is frequently done in an enamel coated cast iron Le Creuset dutch oven. This is a multi-hundred dollar kitchen item that few home cooks can afford let alone use. Electric cooking appliances are almost never seen. Deep fat frying is done in the dutch oven on top of the stove with a thermometer stuck to the side of the pan. An electric deep fat fryer which can maintain a set temperature without an attached thermometer would violate some code of operation. You will never see an electric skillet, griddle, or even waffle iron. Common utensils are rarely seen, replaced with expensive specialty items like specialized fish turners and the like. You never even see a can opener or a toaster.
7) The only canned items used on television cooking shows are imported (generally from Italy) and they are primarily confined to certain specially grown tomatoes. The cans are already opened when their contents are called for in the recipe.
8) Ingredients in general are almost always hard to obtain for most home cooks and require expeditions to high end and specialty grocers, often requiring visits to multiple stores before all ingredients can be obtained. Everything will be expensive, one meal, sometimes one dish costing as much as the weekly food budget for a family.
9) Multi-step recipes that can require a whole day or more of preparation -- brining, rubbing, marinating, sus vide pre-cooking, grilling, etc. -- before serving. If anything is cut or chopped on air it is either done with a mandolin, food processor, or "crazy knife skills." Pressure cookers are never used or seen, although I once heard mention of such devices.
10) Plating and serving is often an entire production in itself, requiring special plates, tools, and techniques. Foods are stacked or set at intricate angles. There may be a bed of some exotic grain or uniquely prepared potatoes (purple and yellow are favored) or unusual rice. Just as often, there may be a vegetable base of unusual greens or chopped and 'caramelized' something or other. A delicate sauce and dots of foamed stuff are drizzled around the portion, which itself glistens and sparkles under the studio lights as if glazed with something unmentioned in the recipe. In fact, there often is an extra glaze on the finished dish added just for the cameras, or so I'm told.
11) Plating and serving is done slowly, reverently, with the cook/chef bent over close to the plate, placing micro greens with precise micro tongs, dusting with seasoning, sesame, or what have you, adding a sprig of violets or other edible flowers at the end, and carefully wiping the rim of the plate with a handy towel before actually presenting the dish.
12) If the dish is sampled on air, it is done as slowly and reverently with much mmming and ohhhing, and "that is SO good"-ing. Words like "AMAZING!" are required. You hear "amazing, caramelized, and umami" frequently used throughout the preparation, serving, and sampling of the dish or meal. "Brown bits," "fond," "pan sauce," "deglazing".... and on and on, the specialized cooking vocabulary keeps expanding, often without explanation. "Umami" suddenly became the it-word often used without any definition or explanation, just assuming the audience would know it refers to savory flavors in Japanese.
13) The Big Idea of most of these cooking shows is to 1) bring high end restaurant techniques and ingredients into the home cook's frame of reference; 2) sell very expensive equipment and ingredients to home cooks who are expected to diligently search out these items; 3) make it possible to make the "impossible" restaurant dish at home (maybe); 4) present and maintain food fantasies for the masses. Alternatively, make home cooking equivalent to specialty cooking, and make it a race to accomplish the "impossible" within a half-hour or hour format.
Contrast this contemporary television cooking with what was common in early days of these shows (think Julia Child in her first incarnation but not just her) and go back even farther to when home cooking was presented as an exercise in precision and science, but always respecting budgets. Healthy meals at reasonable cost prepared carefully and often quickly with modern but not excessive appliances.
In the old days, restaurant techniques -- whether high end or diner -- were often simply ignored in order to present what could reasonably be done at home. Julia went to the Cordon Bleu in Paris and so she knew full well how to do fine French cooking in the highest and most intricate manner, but the whole point of the show was to do something not necessarily "fine cooking" at all, but something adapted to the home, to standard ingredients and appliances, and something that might actually be found in a country French home rather than a high end Parisian restaurant. Her close friend Jacques Pepin offered much the same idea of French cooking in his own shows later. It doesn't have to be "impossible."
Yet today, apparently, what's truly "impossible" is television cooking shows geared to households whose money is tight, whose time constraints ensure they can't constantly seek out the rarest of ingredients and super-luxe equipment, and where quick, nutritious and tasty meals are more important than being able to spend all day attempting to duplicate a restaurant meal that the household will never experience in the flesh.
It's a mystery.
