Opinion
Just a Dash with Matty Matheson sees The Bear star bringing his cult YouTube show to the Netflix mainstream. So, is it any good?
Matty Matheson has had an unusual career trajectory. Many successful chefs have transitioned into a career as entertainers, but few have become acclaimed for their acting in a prestige drama show (or as the voters of the Emmys and Golden Globes insist on calling The Bear – because they have never watched it – a “comedy”).
But then this is down to the fact that Matty Matheson is a very unusual person. Certainly much stranger than Gordon Ramsay or Paul Hollywood, who in their attempts to play wacky on TV, can only dream of achieving the genuine oddity of Matheson.
Just A Dash began as a YouTube show in which Matheson stood in his kitchen and cooked delicious meals while rambling off on random tangents, musing on inexplicable subjects and bursting into ear-splitting squawks of passion about one thing or another.
For two seasons the show drew millions, but for its third season it’s developed a much bigger scope and more lofty – if still near-undefinable – ambitions, to the extent that it’s now on Netflix.
The third season comes a few years after the previous one, and Matheson has, with the confidence earned from his star turn as handyman Neil Fak on The Bear, fully developed his performing range, completing the evolution from Heavy Metal Dom DeLuise to Rough-Sleeping Love Child of Jack Black and Zach Galifinakis.
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Matheson is still rambling, still shrieking, still showing off the vast rubbery acres of tattoo-covered flesh between neck and waist, but with a kind of demented sophistication that can perhaps be best described as “Extreme Canadian”. For, like its televisual compatriot Letterkenny, Just A Dash exists in its own world, with its own rules and its own peculiar language of comedy.
Just A Dash exists in its own world, with its own rules and its own peculiar language of comedy.
If one went into season 3 of Just a Dash cold, one could easily find oneself totally unsure of the ground beneath one’s feet, unable to determine whether this is a reality show that is no good at hiding its artifice, or a reality spoof that isn’t quite good enough at making its purpose clear.
It’s only after you soak up a few episodes that you realise what’s going on. Or rather, you don’t realise what is going on, or indeed if anything IS going on – but you do realise that refusing to allow you to realise that is definitely being done deliberately. Probably.
The thing is, Just A Dash keeps slipping its bonds. It’s not a documentary, it’s a mockumentary, but in a way it is a documentary – it’s a documentary about some people making a mockumentary. And it’s not a cooking show, it’s a spoof of cooking shows, but in a way it is a cooking show, because Matheson is genuinely cooking great-looking dishes, and telling us how he does it. The overall effect is something akin to The Office, if the cast were actually selling paper while shooting.
Existing somewhere in the vast fertile space between Man v. Food and Posh Nosh, Matheson travels about the place, from his home to the open road in an RV, to wherever takes his fancy. With the help of his producer and food stylist, Michelle Rabin, and a much-abused crew, including Ricky Staffieri who plays his brother on The Bear, he cooks something wherever he happens to be, interrupting the process with various stream-of-consciousness monologues, musings on life, love and his own overwhelming wonderfulness, and rants shrilly about everything that’s going wrong.
You will learn a bit about food from this show, but you won’t learn much about Matheson apart from the fact that he is a very funny man with a talent for keeping you off balance. The ostensible plot of each episode is just something on which to hang the quick-cutting series of one-liners, non sequiturs and gradual building up of Matheson’s persona into a bizarre melange of neuroses and self-aware hysteria. It gets to the point where, just as you’re absolutely sure that 100 per cent of the show is carefully calibrated comedy, the exhausted chef delivers a speech about how empty he feels and suddenly you doubt your own judgment all over again.
By the time Matheson is flaked out on a massage table while Rabin puppeteers his limp arm to cut parsley, and lines genuinely deserving of comedic immortality like “Do you think you are the way you are because of margarine?” are dropping, you will most likely have accepted Just a Dash into your heart and realised the vital truth that sometimes the real haute cuisine was the maniacal Canadians we met along the way.
Just a dash with Matty Matheson
Watch it if: You enjoy in equal measure foodie TV, the deconstruction of foodie TV, and not being sure what you’re watching.
Don’t watch it if: Jamie Oliver is as weird as you ever want to get.
Sizzle rating: Four burners out of five – SEARED
Stream it: Netflix
