One of my guilty pleasures is Iron Chef on the Food Network. Watching the seriousness the chefs have in a cooking competition coupled with the overactive English dubbing puts me over the top. So boy was I excited when an American version was being produced. And it wasn't the crappy William Shatner version either.

Approved by its Japanese creators, Iron Chef America brought about 3 of the most popular Food Network Chefs: Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Wolfgang Puck. These would be the American Iron Chefs and their first two competitors would be two Iron Chefs from the Japanese show: IC Japanese Morimoto and IC French Sakai. But while watching the show, something smelled fishy, and it wasn't the massive amounts of seafood being used.

What was good about the show? The sharp pictures gave us a really good idea of what was being cooked. There were nice angles to document the action and it was much better than the handheld grainy pictures produced from Japan. The Food Network also deserves credit for sticking with as much of the Iron Chef aura as they could without actually being a carbon copy.

So what was bad about the show? Though they're words said it (here they went overboard with the constant references to Kaga and such), you could never feel the tension. Everyone was relaxed while cooking. No beads of sweat pouring down. No catastrophes to be seen. Even the countdown was nice and quiet. The announcer Alton Brown wasn't his eccentric self and his knowledge, as well as the reporter's, seemed to be lacking.

Finally, there was the judging. The dishes the Japanese chefs made probably would have produced a slam-dunk win in Japan. Yet, they lost, badly, to their American counterparts, which is inexplicable. Plating and originality was a dead-heat, but the Americans won tasting by at least 5 points, which seemed a bit excessive. As a result, Flay, Batali, and Puck won their battles.

The final battle was genius. It was a mixed doubles event with Batali and Sakai going against Morimoto and Flay. I didn't get to watch it but I saw the end and I really wanted Sakai to win one, he after all being the King of Iron Chefs, but he fell to defeat again, even after a summary that portrayed a negative light on the Morimoto/Flay side of things.