Friendly Advice for the Production Team of 'Cutthroat Kitchen'

Hi folks!

Look, we all know that social media is pretty awesome, especially if you're a basic cable TV show looking to drum up enthusiasm for your series that could translate into a bump in the ratings. People love to talk about television on social media, and even to watch shows while chatting with other viewers about what they're seeing live. That provides a real incentive to find ways to get your show "trending", in order to get people to switch over to see what's happening. We all get that.

And yes, it's fun to come up with clever topic hashtags, funny and quirky things that will get the public curious about what's going on with your show at that moment. Silly, funny little hashtags like "#hashtaghashtagpan" can create a little bit of excitement and, well...buzz...that one would hope translates to a few extra viewers. And since those viewers help pay for the show (indirectly through advertising, let's not explain your own business model to you) then it's understandable that you're always looking for new quirky tags.

But here's the thing about the Internet and social media...they're used for a lot of different things. Some of them are things that, well...only grown-ups talk about. Special, grown-up things that don't necessarily involve cooking or television, except for the people for which both of those things are very important to their grown-up activities because of a special rule we call Rule #34. And it's important to remember that those grown-ups, talking about grown-up things, are on the same social media as everybody else, and the only thing that really divides them is the topics they talk about.

Basically, what I'm saying is that if one of your contestants does happen to slice off the tip of their finger, as happened in the March 13th episode, it's probably for the best if you don't try to get it trending with the hashtag "#justthetip". Because there are two very different meanings to that particular phrase, used by two very different groups of people, and trust me when I say that neither one of the groups who use it want to think about the other meaning when they're very...emotionally invested...in using it in its current context.

Okay? Okay.