Netflix’s “Unfinished Beef,” a live competitive-eating special follows within the plodding footsteps set forth by the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, the July 4 spectacular on Coney Island. But what it recalled much more vividly were the human-interest freakouts Fox aired across the turn of the century, like “Man vs. Beast” and “Who Desires to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” Broadcast survive Labor Day from Las Vegas, the competition between pro hot-dog eaters Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi had greater than a whiff of only-in-America decadence and excess.
The special, which ran a bit of over an hour, built to the 10-minute showdown between Chestnut and Kobayashi, including short, produced packages introducing each parties to the viewer. “I really like putting an obscene amount of food in me. It’s what I really like doing,” Chestnut told viewers, demonstrating the exercises he performs to maintain his jaw strong. (This isn’t any small thing; Kobayashi’s profession, we were told, was derailed by a 2007 jaw injury.)
Chestnut and Kobayashi are careerlong rivals within the competitive-eating space, wherein entrants are judged on how much they’ll ingest in a closed-ended time frame; by the point they were stuffing sausages into their mouths, their mutual enmity seemed clear (if nebulous in its origin), as did their differences in style. Chestnut, whose past variety of dipping his hot dog buns in water to lubricate them was expressly banned under Netflix’s rules, seemed blithe and unaffected — a machine, on a mission from which nothing could dissuade him. Kobayashi, who ended up a 17-dog deficit behind Chestnut, brought a difficult humanity to the competition, a way of struggle, as he rocked forwards and backwards, urging the food to go down.
That is the most recent in Netflix’s ongoing endeavor to make itself a destination for live events, and — as with the recent Joe Rogan comedy special they aired, albeit for various reasons — there was a can’t-look-away quality to all of it. That Kobayashi lost, and by a large margin, may somewhat overshadow the surreality even of his own feat — in ten minutes, he ate 66 hot dogs. (It was originally marked as 67, however the judges, in a show of officiousness that ought to indicate Netflix’s goofily straight-faced approach to the entire endeavor, deducted a dog based on the load of food he still had in his mouth and had spilled on the ground. Chestnut, meanwhile, ate 83.) Each men excel at something that not only has no practical utility but, if one stops and thinks about it for greater than five seconds, is fairly obscene in a world where unquelled hunger exists. Each, too, are milking it for all it’s price; this yr, Chestnut was banned from the Nathan’s contest, which he has won 16 times previously, after he accepted a sponsorship from the meat-free brand Inconceivable Foods. On stage, cramming meat into his maw, he wore patches on his sleeves promoting a private wipe marketed for men to make use of in the lavatory. There was a certain bleak, cause-and-effect logic to the ad placement.
Their excellence, corresponding to it’s, was placed into context by an earlier segment, wherein three Olympians, competing as a team, couldn’t eat as many chicken wings as could pro eater Matt Stonie. Wings, requiring the eater to denude a bone, have a certain grotesque quality that hot dogs lack; more soothing was watching the opposite opening act, Leah Shutkever, aim for and achieve a brand new Guinness World Record by eating mass quantities of watermelon, which she devoured like Ms. Pac-Man munching dots, cleanly and with a certain elegance.
Brisk, skilled, and to-the-point, the Netflix special used its fundamental professionalism to mockingly emphasize just how strange a pursuit it was depicting. There was no real wink to the audience, no signal that those producing or those hosting (Rob Riggle and Nikki Garcia, each in utter earnest) thought that this was a wierd method to spend a national holiday. The viewer was left, sooner or later deep into the ten-minute hot dog marathon, to wonder — is it the eaters, or the crowds in Vegas impassionedly cheering them on, who’s not getting it? Or is it me?
