An open letter to Food Network’s Programmers:

Dear Esteemed Fellow Lifeforms,

My congratulations on the continued success of Worst Cooks in America and Cutthroat Kitchen. While both shows are in my “must watch” list, I can see some room for improvement in both. I hope you’ll take these suggestions as constructive criticism.

One of the recurrent themes on Worst Cooks is the competitors’ desire to improve themselves. How many times have we heard them say that what they learn will improve their family lives? Yet the show doesn’t truly support that goal. By the end of the season, the focus has shifted to preparing restaurant-quality meals and impressing the celebrity judges.

With seven seasons in the can–I’m not including the hideous mistake that was the “Celebrity Edition”–there’s a real opportunity to shine some light on the changes the show has brought to the contestants’ lives.

Let’s have a season that brings back former contestants who were eliminated in the early and middle rounds. Let the viewers see which ones have maintained and improved the skills they picked up on their initial appearances–and which ones have forgotten everything they learned.

Similarly, I and, I’m sure, many viewers would love to see a season made up of former runners-up and competitors who were eliminated in the last couple of weeks. We keep hearing the mentors and judges describing the food they produce as restaurant-quality, and we’ve even heard judges give them job offers. That’s a huge amount of improvement, and it would be fascinating to see how many of the contestants who reached that level have accepted those offers or taken other food-related jobs, and how well they’ve kept up their skills.

How about it?

As for Cutthroat Kitchen, after eleven seasons, the premise is starting to get a little stale. Everyone knows what to expect, to the point where the opening recitation of the rules is becoming increasingly perfunctory–why bother explaining the game when the competitors and viewers can recite the spiel along with Alton? It’s time to shake things up a bit.

The defining feature of the show is that, unlike other competitive cooking shows where the chefs are essentially working in isolation, on Cutthroat Kitchen they’re competing head to head. It’s not just about creating the best dish, it’s doing so while fighting off interference from the other chefs.

But the current structure of the show reduces the amount of interference as the episode progresses. We’ve reached the point where we know the chef with the most money remaining in the final round will win the first auction and then not have enough left to avoid losing the second auction. Where’s the thrill in that much predictability?

So less ramp up the possibilities for interference. Don’t eliminate chefs.

Instead, award points to the chefs who produce the best dishes–two points for the best dish, one for the second-best. Let the chef who came up with the least credible effort remain in the game, but penalize him or her by taking away some money, say $1,000.

Even if someone fails miserably in the first two rounds, they could still win it all with a spectacular final round–and if not, they can still make life more difficult for the front-runners by buying sabotages and playing spoiler.

At the end of the game, total up the points. Highest score wins. In the event of a tie, the winner is the chef with the most money left. And we have so much more potential for drama: late surges, creative work-arounds, and grudge-sabotaging.

I realize it’s too late to implement this idea for Season 12, since the first episode will air later this week. But lucky number 13 is coming. What better time to inflict even more misery on the chefs?