I recently started watching the second season of the excellent Culinary Class Wars, a Korean cooking competition show. The first season was great, and so far I’m enjoying the second season, except for one thing. And it’s something the contestants noted too.

The Black Spoons — the “lesser” chefs, for lack of a better term — have a ton of really good chefs on their side. Folks who have Michelin stars, who have enormously-popular restaurants, who have been cooking for decades. Sure, there were a few of these last season, but this season there are a lot of them.

The same thing happened with 24 in 24: the first season had several chefs I knew of, but the second season featured a lot more famous chefs — Masterchef winners, Top Chef alumni, and even a Chopped judge. It changed the dynamic of the show, just as it’s changing the dynamic of Culinary Class Wars. On both shows, chefs saw just how popular the show was and wanted to be on it, and better and better chefs started to apply (and get chosen). We already know that great chefs are great; we want to see the chefs who aren’t as well-known make names for themselves.

At the end of CCW season 1, the winner [spoiler alert] was a chef who had a successful restaurant but wasn’t known nationwide. Of course, after CCW, he became more famous, even going so far as to be a regular fixture on Chef and My Fridge, a popular talk-and-cooking show in Korea. The two winners of 24 in 24 are [again, spoiler alert] Marcel from Top Chef and Jonathan Sawyer (who has been on several other cooking shows and was a Chopped judge a few times). While Marcel wasn’t as well-known as he would’ve been had he won his season of Top Chef, he was still a successful chef. Jonathan Sawyer is someone I’d never heard of, but he clearly was famous enough that other chefs knew who he was. Plus, you don’t get to be a Chopped judge if you don’t know your shit.

I can only imagine what the contestants will be like in the third seasons of these shows. The better they get, the less interesting the show becomes, in my opinion, because they’re too good and we don’t expect them to make mistakes. Also, the chefs doing the judging have to nitpick even more than they normally would. I want to see chefs show off their skills, but I don’t necessarily want to see chefs that I know are already at the top of their game. I want them to have something to aspire to. And it seems like, in the second seasons of popular cooking shows, we don’t get that as often.