Tituss Burgess' New Cooking Competition Show ‘Dishmantled’ Features a Food Cannon

The race to launch streaming services is heating up: Disney’s service, Disney+, is scheduled to debut this coming November, while Martha Stewart launched her own streaming TV service in October, MarthaStewart.tv, where you can find episodes of “all of her classic shows” in one place. (Plus, no ads.) Come April 2020, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman’s Quibi will also join the streaming platform community, promising “quick bites of captivating entertainment, created for mobile by the best talent.” Among teased projects such as an untitled Guillermo del Toro series and a historical drama about Charlemagne, last week, news of Quibi’s latest venture broke—a new cooking competition show, Dishmantled, hosted by Tituss Burgess (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), described as “a high-octane cooking competition that will literally blow your socks off,” reports Deadline. And that’s not an understatement—the premise of Dishmantled is centered around a food cannon. We repeat, food cannon.

Dishmantled will be produced by Chopped creator and executive producer Linda Lea and Good Egg Entertainment, as well as Electus. According to Deadline, each episode begins with two blindfolded chefs, who are promptly cannon-blasted in the face with a mystery dish—think of it as pie-throwing, only significantly more aggressive and messy. The chefs then have to determine what the dish is (again, based on the experience of it colliding with their face) and attempt to recreate it in a timed challenge. Whoever reproduces the closest match of the cannon dish will win a cash prize of a yet-to-be-disclosed amount. It sounds like the latest installment in an ever-growing genre of quirky food competition shows, joining the ranks of Nailed It! and Cutthroat Kitchen. Plus, with Burgess as the host, it’s probably going to be pretty funny, too.

Dishmantled is one of many new food shows announced this summer. In July, PBS unveiled the concept for Vivian Howard’s latest series, South by Somewhere, while CollegeHumor teased a new mockumentary series called Gods of Food, which satirizes fine dining tropes and features commentary from culinary experts Hugh Acheson, Richard Blais, Jet Tila, and Alison Roman. We also learned that Top Chef host and judge Padma Lakshmi would be getting a series of her own on Hulu, described as “a living cookbook made up more from people and culture than recipes” that dives into the culinary traditions from "the first Americans to the latest arrivals." The yet-to-be-named show will feature 10 half-hour episodes—stay tuned as more information is announced.