The Voice vs MasterChef: Why Reality Really Bites

New coaches! New singers! The best home cooks ever! A whole new season of watching Matt Preston edge ever closer to an inevitable heart attack!

The promises have flown thick and fast from The Voice and MasterChef, the tentpole reality shows presently airing on channels Nine and Ten. At a stretch, Channel Seven's House Rules could be included in that echelon, but I don't hate myself enough to sit through it, so for the sake of symmetry let's say that only the first two matter, if that's the word we really want to go with here.

And now the shows' first episodes of the year have aired – The Voice on Sunday, MasterChef last night – safely clear of any competitors of the same format on other channels, instead pitting amateur chefs and singers against each other in a battle for the nation's hearts and slowly diminishing attention spans.

So, does the brand new season of brand new reality TV newness live up to the hype?

You probably know the answer, but it wouldn't be much of a recap article if I just said, “No, but thanks for reading; I'm going to go watch cats lick themselves to German techno on YouTube,” and left you with that mental image, now, would it?

For its part, The Voice's major new chair-odynamic contributions are The Voice UK hand-me-downs Kylie Minogue and will.i.am, who fill the void (if that's the word etc) left by the departed Delta Goodrem and Seal, as if the show's producers were trying to recast main characters in a sequel movie after the original actors got all precious about their fee.

That leaves incumbent coaches Ricky Martin, who seemed unable to even give away a spot on his team early on in the first episode, and fried chicken/Vodafone enthusiast Joel Madden. Also, for some reason, this guy – 

– whose sole reason for being on the show seems to be as an occasional framing device for interviews, in a manner only ever so slightly less wooden than if they were being conducted by an actual frame made of solid oak.

And then there are the contestants themselves. Traditionally, The Voice's blind auditions – and the fact its candidates are drawn from a pool of people who are already known to possess at least some talent – mean that it lacks a lot of the painful hilarity championed by Australian Idol, so it's pretty dry viewing unless you're actually really into cover versions and documentaries about failure.

But The Voice's problem runs deeper than that. Try this exercise, for context: Close your eyes. Not right now. Read this paragraph first. Then close them. Think hard. Picture a world in which The Voice does not exist. Really, truly picture it. Then open your eyes.

Done? OK. Here's a question: Was the world you imagined suffering from some kind of horrible, crippling singer shortage? Was it poorer because The Voice didn't exist? Yeah, I thought not.

Over on Channel Ten, it's obvious that the network is putting a lot of eggs in the MasterChef basket, not only choosing not to run it against its popular competitor My Kitchen Rules, but jacking up the melodrama and emotional exploitation to levels that would make The Biggest Loser blush and then shame-eat six hams.

In the first five minutes, the show tells us the contestants – starting from the top 50, being narrowed down to the top 24 over last night and tonight's episodes – will “risk it all” for the “ultimate prize” and their journey will “inspire” us, as if they're amputee cancer sufferers who climbed Mount Everest without an oxygen tank and found the cure for being amputee cancer sufferers at the summit. 

That's the sort of scenario that those words – “risk”, “ultimate”, “inspire” – conjure up in my mind, anyway, because I believe in words having useful definitions.

So, before the first ad break, we had the notion that this competition somehow means something force-fed down our throats. It is dramatic and it matters. Now, it was time to get emotional.

Not twenty minutes into the episode, there were tears courtesy of Emily, from Brisbane, who was standing at Matt Preston's mercy as he considered whether to pass her through (his co-judges George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan had already given their approval).

He did – but it's why he did that points to the reason MasterChef is one of the most disingenuous and inherently unlikeable shows on Australian television.

He passed her through not because her laksa was the best he had ever eaten – he openly admitted it wasn't, and the fact they are looking for “the best”, i.e. the whole point of the series, was cause for his hesitation to begin with – but because, “most of all”, he wanted Emily – who had given up a career as a biochemical engineer, for which she had no passion, to cook – to make her pro-biochemical-engineering parents proud.

Emily progressed not because her laksa was quality, but because, as Mehigan so showbiz-ly put it, “it's a great story; it's great motivation.”

The sad part is he's right – Emily is unquestionably good television, all emotions on her sleeve and the kind of genuine excitement that you don't see on a daily basis unless you run a daycare centre made entirely of waterslides that caters exclusively to children who can only feel emotional extremes. It's kind of beautiful.

But, still, the fact remains that because she had a good backstory – and there were plenty of folks with “good” (read: tragic/affecting) stories who just happened to be sent through to the next round – some poor sap whose life dream has always been to cook and who makes a better laksa than Emily could miss out just because their father didn't beat them as a child.

Which raises a fundamental problem with MasterChef as a concept: if you have wanted to do nothing but cook all your life and it's your “big dream” and you're going to “do anything” to achieve it, how about starting with, you know, an apprenticeship, like a normal human being? If you're so serious about being a skilled chef of renown, and the end goal isn't just to get your own TV show on SBS or a series of kitsch cookbooks, then you shouldn't be above doing a TAFE course in service of achieving success.

To its credit, there is an endearing side to MasterChef, small though it is, and it simply shines through in the genuine excitement of the contestants receiving heartfelt compliments or acceptance from the judges. I'm not indifferent to other people's happiness – I'm not an unfeeling monster, you know – and if the show possesses anything that even remotely resembles charm, it's probably that aspect.

Still, it's pointless to pretend that MasterChef and The Voice are bringing anything new to the table this season. Although audiences are evidently still enamoured with the latter, with its second episode last night drawing in almost 2 million viewers, it appears they're struggling to keep stomaching MasterChef 's increasingly stale tale of culinary aspiration - a frankly sad figure of 874,000 people tuned in to watch three sponges eating, and complaining about, other people's cooking. Even Media Watch almost matched that (732,000), while freaking House Rules eclipsed it (1.09 million viewers).

They're the same shows they've always been, and the end result will be likewise remain unchanged: a brief stint enjoying some time in the … well, not the spotlight, but maybe the spotlight's dimmer, constantly flickering brother, for whoever takes out the competition before we all forget they ever existed just in time for the next iteration to air. Maybe House Rules is worth a gander after all.