Burglar Chefs
Show concept: sorta-famous chefs break into people’s houses while they’re not there and cook a meal.
Step 1: Get some chefs. Edgy types. They will likely have many tattoos. Bonus points if they have a past in crime. Extra bonus points if they have some burglary skills. These won’t be celebrity chefs exactly; the chef might have a restaurant gathering buzz in a small city, for instance, or a food truck with a wacky yet popular concept. It’s not a big deal if the burglarized party doesn’t really know who the chef is.
Step 2: Find some people who don’t mind being burglarized. What’s in it for them is a meal and being on TV. Make sure these individuals know what they’re getting into. They will have to know in advance that at some point they’ll be burglarized for a TV show… they just don’t know when this will happen. There has to be the element of surprise. The show will pay for damage to their locks and security systems.
Step 3: Make the show. Staging a typical episode of Burglar Chefs will involve four phases: surveillance, the break-in, the cook, and the reveal.
During the surveillance phase, we get a chance to meet our burglar chef while they’re casing the house they’re supposed to burglarize. If the burglar chef has no real burglary skills, they’re allowed to call in friends to help them out with this project; these friends could be interesting secondary characters, a glimpse at the real criminal underworld, but the editors of the show might need to blank out their faces.
The break-in should play for comedy. The burglar chef should have a difficult time getting in and do a lot of swearing. Some frustrated chefs might resort might lose their tempers and kick in the door. Think of this as the first challenge.
The second challenge comes once the chef has broken in, because now they’re supposed to cook a meal — and they’re only allowed to use ingredients they find in a participant’s home. This too should play for comedy: a lot of sniffing random things in the fridge and saying yuck. When shooting/editing the cook, establish the ingredients the burglar chef will be using, but don’t give away too much; the preparation of the meal should be shown in close-up shots, so that when the reveal comes, we get to marvel at the inventiveness of our burglar chef, how they made something out of nothing.
The reveal should elicit wows, hands over mouths, maybe even tears from some participants, when they come home and find a professionally prepared meal on their table. The burglar chef jumps out at the end, says bon appetit or what have you, and goes on their merry way.
Important to note: Make sure there are no guns in the home of participants, because we don’t want our burglar chefs getting shot. This could happen if a burglar chef thinks someone’s not home, but actually they are, they’re waiting around for a lover on a Tuesday afternoon, or playing hookie from work, or just hanging around and quietly cleaning their guns.