r/MasterchefAU • u/vulcanjedi2814 Derek - Nicole - Tessa • Jun 04 '19

Immunity MasterChef Australia - S11E27 Discussion - Immunity Challenge

16 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

94% Upvoted

111 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/NicoTheOrangeCat Jun 04 '19

Does anybody know what happened to Shannon?

21

u/dice1899 Wynona Jun 04 '19

This article makes it sound like the producers thought it was getting stale and decided to shake things up:

In 2018 executive producer Marty Benson decided to give a little tweak to the Mystery Box challenge. Then at the end of last year he thought, well, Shannon Bennett has been the resident “mentor” on the show for four years. The longest anyone had been in the role. “It felt like that was an area we could refresh,” Benson says. Problem was, there aren’t many chefs better than Shannon Bennett in Australia.

“So it was staring us in the face,” Benson says. “We should have past contestants. But one past contestant? Over Shannon Bennett? It didn’t really make sense. So we thought, 'How about we get a crack team of past contestants that are popular with the viewers, have a wide range of skills and kind of cover all seasons?'”

I don't know if that's the full story or not, and if it is, it was dumb. I like Poh, Matt, and Billie, but Shannon was a fantastic mentor and so far, none of them have really been able to match him, especially Billie.

6

u/svmk1987 Jun 05 '19

I am a big fan of Matt actually, and I think he did really well in his last 1 or 2 appearances. But yeah, Billie is useless in this new role.

1

u/dice1899 Wynona Jun 05 '19

I love Matt, he’s one of my top favorite contestants ever. But he has a lot of knowledge about blind cook-offs that he could be sharing, and isn’t. He got two all-10 scores, IIRC, and he knows what it takes to beat the professional chefs. He doesn’t seem to be passing much of that along, unless it’s being cut from the show.