Selena + Chef Is The Perfect Show for Finals Season
By: Lanie Brice ‘24
With midterms and finals season starting to blur together, we all have our own mountains of work to dig through. Whether you’re looking to decompress or share my bad habit of watching TV and doing work at the same time, Selena and Chef is the perfect show to watch during this hectic time.
Last January, my family and I huddled around the TV in the living room to try out Selena Gomez’s brand new cooking show, Selena + Chef. None of us were sure what to expect from a series about cooking helmed by an actress and singer. But since I’ve followed her career since Wizards of Waverly Place, we were excited to give it a try. I didn’t expect the new show to give me a massive wave of nostalgia, but it immediately made me realize how much of Alex’s dry, witty humor on Wizards was really Selena’s shining through. The show won all of us over almost immediately.
The premise of Selena + Chef centers around Selena and her friends/roommates learning how to cook guided, over video chat, by some of the country’s most notable chefs. Many of these mentors you’ll recognize from the Food Network, Top Chef, and other food media outlets. In exchange for the lesson, the show donates $10,000 to a charity of their choice and gives the organization a spotlight at the end of every show.
Selena is hilarious and experiences many pitfalls on her journey to master cooking that she takes in stride. With the help of her friends and the chef, they put together actually impressive meals. As the seasons pass by, it’s fun to watch Selena develop more of an aptitude in the kitchen and gain confidence. She also explores a wide variety of cuisines from around the world while learning about their cultural significance and the role these foods played in the featured chef’s lives. I always feel like I learn something new every time I turn on an episode.
And as a viewer, you can learn new practical cooking tips along the way from captions that pop up on the screen explaining steps in the cooking process. HBO Max also has PDFs of all the recipes she makes on the show available on their website so you can even cook along with her.
What started as a quarantine experiment has branched into a delightfully sweet cooking show meets reality TV fusion that borrows the best elements of both. While I loved cooking shows as a preteen, I haven’t found myself gravitating to them much in the last few years, but I always get excited when I see new episodes of Selena and Chef come out. It’s perfect for the times when you’re too tired to dive into a show where you have to follow a storyline but also don’t want the yelling and drama that comes with most reality TV shows. Selena and Chef is feel good through and through.
If you’re not one for watching in order, some of my favorite episodes are the ones that feature Kwame Onwuachi, Marcus Samuelsson, and Padma Lakshshmi. If there’s a celebrity chef you admire, scroll through the seasons because they’ll probably make an appearance at least once.
Season 3 of Selena and Chef started at the end of October, and 3 new episodes are added onto HBO Max every week, each featuring a new chef.
Want more from Trojans 360?
Visit Trojans 360 on Facebook & Twitter to stay up to date with more student content! You can also Ask A Trojan an anonymous question, and we’ll try to answer it in a future post. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram!
Trojans 360 is USC’s official student-run blog. Content created by students, for students.
