The Restaurant started out fascinating, declined rapidly, and tonight just fell off a cliff. The first outright awful hour of television I've ever seen Mark Burnett produce.

What happened?

It was an interesting experiment in moving the reality genre back out into real life--where it started, with An American Family and The Real World--but with some new approaches. There is tremendous potential there, but this series sure fell flat on its face.

The biggest problem was superficiality. A steady stream of conflicts, but you could never tell who was at fault, what was really going on. Why were they giving Perry such a hard time in the kitchen all the time? Was he screwing up? Was he working hard enough?--he sure seemed to be. Was he just new at his job? Did he need more training? What the hell was going on? All the conflicts played out like that--rather they did not play out. We just saw a problem, grew confused by it. Then it would mystically change one day. With Perry all we got was one line from him saying he came in early and focused that day. That's a story arc?

It also suffered desperately from lack of context. I kept wondering who this compared to other restaurants. Was some of the shouting and confusion normal industry practice? Were people in those positions expected to act like that. I'm not asking for a documentary, I don't want one, but I would like a little explanation. An artful method of providing context would have solved a major flaw.

Then there is Rocco. For a long time I kept trying to give him the benefit of the doubt--I kept wondering how many of his outbursts were justified and whether he needed to be out there schmoozing so much. Finally, after being a dick in nearly every situation he encountered, it became pretty clear he's just a dick. And that the arrogant annoying waiter who wants to be both a rapper and a standup comic is just an annoying loser, but that was clear from the start--so why did we have to spend so much time with him?

On and on and on. There was a great show to be had here, Burnett showed us glimpses of what it could have been. But he thoroughly mishandled his material.