Chopped, canceled show lasts 3 episodes

Meanwhile, over at Fox, White's former protégé and rival, Gordon Ramsay, is racing through his fifth season of "Hell's Kitchen" and preparing a third season of "Kitchen Nightmares."

There are all kinds of lessons in White's abrupt fall from grace, though none is of much use to home cooks seeking tips for blender hollandaise or brining.

As anyone who has watched "Hell's Kitchen," "Top Chef" or "Iron Chef America" knows, cooking shows are no more about food than talk shows are about conversation. Chef competitions, in particular, showcase personality and pressure-cooker brinkmanship — boiling stockpots and roiling tempers. Success depends on the charisma of the star, the chemistry (preferably bad) of judges and contestants and, above all, timing. White, handsome, talented and famous, fell short on all fronts.

Reality-come-lately rarely works. After "The Apprentice" became a hit, Fox tried its own version in 2004, recruiting Richard Branson, the Virgin Atlantic Airways entrepreneur, to be the star of "The Rebel Billionaire." Contestants competed to become a Branson employee, but the billionaire's idea of on-the-air training turned out to be an extreme-sports version of "The Apprentice." (Nerves were tested in a hot-air balloon rather than the boardroom).

The tone was all wrong. Unlike Donald Trump, Branson spoke in an Englishman's tactful, apologetic manner, which confused American viewers accustomed to macho mogul-speak. He tried to adapt NBC's metaphor for the American rat race to his own, more refined brand of adventure capitalism, and nobody watched.

White, who has his own books, TV shows and restaurants and is nearly as well-known in Britain as Ramsay, fell into the same trap as Sir Richard. He tried to adapt the formula to his personality — the most recent edition of his personality. White was one of the first bad-boy chefs to transform British cuisine in the 1990s. In a business famous for unmanaged anger and sous-chef abuse, White stood out: Many years and restaurant kitchens ago, White berated Ramsay so savagely, he made his young follower cry.

More recently, White has sought to sweeten his reputation, assuring British critics that he is now a calmer, wiser artist who can hold his temper and his profanity. "The Chopping Block" was his chance to let America in on his personal growth, a haute cuisine version of Sharon Stone trying to debunk her sex-bomb image by playing a death-row convict in "Last Dance."

On his show, White pontificated on the fine points of restaurant success from a leather armchair, a cooking Alistair Cooke — only he didn't actually cook. Once in a while, White would step into the kitchen and show a hapless contestant how to slice a tomato, but viewers rarely saw him break an egg or a sweat. Worse, they never heard him swear.

Network cooking shows aren't about food, but they are about cooks. Ramsay is in the kitchen, not at the judges' table, and he turns every roast duck and baked Alaska into a morality play in which good prep work triumphs over all kinds of evil: burned sauces, slow wait service and over-salted stock. And he does it in the spirit of the British navy circa 1800 — with ritual floggings and pungent insults. "Bollocking" is an English term for harsh reprimand that one rarely hears anymore, except on British cooking shows, where chefs are constantly bollocking their charges. Ramsay is the bollocking king.

Cable has different rules. The judges on "Top Chef" don't cook on camera, they glide onstage as culinary demigods who unerringly find the tiny underlying flaw that sours the vinaigrette or smothers the stew. But "Top Chef" is on Bravo, a cable network that is also home to "Project Runway" and caters to a narrow but devoted demographic with highfalutin tastes and insider knowledge.

In a sense, "Top Chef" serves as counterprogramming to "Iron Chef," a cooking contact sport on the Food Network that has some of the high testosterone appeal of action movies like "Con Air." In the place of campy machismo and over-the-top car crashes, "Iron Chef" offers kung fu vegetable chopping and hyperbolically flaming grills (pyro porn).

Networks have to offer viewers a little of both. That's exactly what Ramsay does. He is a discerning mentor and a brutal drill sergeant, and he poaches what he preaches.

NBC, of all networks, should have known better than to toy with foodie expectations. One of the network's more embarrassing belly-flops was "Emeril," a 2001 sitcom that starred Emeril Lagasse as the chef on a popular cooking show, and that was quickly canceled.

But White also has his own desire for dignity to blame. He didn't want to dirty his hands on "The Chopping Block." He ended up with eggs Florentine on his face.