What I notice is that the head chef isn't screaming at his underlings & calling them "donkey-breath".

Ramsey is successful in large part because he's an abrasive, abusive asshole who's fun to watch. It's not his ability to listen that stands him apart from the crowd.

What I notice is that this show is an educational cooking show based in a functioning restaurant and not a reality show in which people are competing for a position as executive chef at a restaurant.

That chef is Marco Pierre White. Ramsey eventually became his protege. White had a swagger that Ramsey can't even begin to approach.

Now THAT I'd watch. There's this restaurant here in Portland called Montage which is one of my favorites in the world, and has been since I was a kid. It's hard to explain, but if you visit and hear about "blah blah blah" Zagat rated/Guy Fieri went there bullshit fuck those places and go to Montage.

Anyway, they give their staff (especially the line cooks) complete freedom to be as assholeish as they want with the customers and fellow employees. Like they couldn't stab you with your own steak knife if you kept sending it back, but you know they're thinking about it. Ramsay would have fun there, and I'd like to see who would win between him and the head line cook (it's an open kitchen. You can hear it all and it's not an act)

I think people just have a natural curiosity when it comes to stuff they experience but don't think about (see also Dirty Jobs), and after a certain point it also becomes a formulaic drama, and people love Schadenfreude and picking sides.

Give me a show about the restaurant manager who knocks up the brain-dead waitress while his wife is in Greece, and the wife comes over, and she's a really nice middle-aged lady who was clearly beautiful once, and she's the only person in the kitchen who doesn't know. Or about the dishwasher who reported his boss for stealing food from school lunch programs and is never able to find another job, so one day he just jumps off the roof of a 12 story building and lands SPLAT right in the middle of the street in the middle of the evening rush hour.

These are just the things I happened to witness first-hand. When that guy jumped, the cops covered him up, and you could see his shitty Payless sneakers sticking out from under the sheet.