WARNING: SPOILERS. If you want to watch the first episode of Top Chef and enjoy the suspense, skip this story.

Last night on television, if you happened to watch Bravo TV at 10pm (9 Central), you got to watch a man get nailed to a cross.

Top Chef: Miami — the third season of the hard-driving culinary reality show — opened not with an epic bang, but with low tragedy. It would've been a farce, in fact, were it not for the human being who was stuck in the middle of it.

The story begins with the casting of the show. If you're a producer for a program like Top Chef, you juggle people like chefs juggle ingredients. You're looking for a mix of individuals whose talent, cooking styles, personality types and backstories make for a sometimes explosive, always dynamic mix when put under the pressure of a $100,000 televised competition.

So, let's say, for example, you cast a guy from northern Mississippi who takes pride in his plainspoken country background and simple-but-delicious cooking. He's all "aw, shucks" and he's just excited to have made it to the big leagues, where he can give it his best shot.

Now, the backstory: His father was a chef. "Was," because he's dead. Dead, because the business of cooking drove him to suicide.

Wow! So, this contestant must be a great chef, right? The producers must have vetted the hell out of him, because a lot of the audience's heart will go out to the man. It would be sad, not funny, if the guy finished near the bottom of the quickfire challenge because he didn't actually know what an amuse bouche was. And it would be unconscionable if — on the very first episode of the show — he messed up a relatively simple boar chop dish that was pronounced inedible by most of the judges.

Clay was crucified.

He wasn't, however, crucified by the judges. They were the Pontius Pilates of this spectacle — the public hand that, in the course of gittin' 'er done, had to swing a hammer and nail a guy up. No, the real villains in this particular metaphor are the show's producers, who picked a perfectly nice, ambitious, and apparently none-too-expert chef from Mississippi to take a heartbreaking national fall.

Moreover, the producers made sure viewers knew about Clay's personal tragedy because it made his loss so much more tangy and exciting. Why not, after all, use the anecdote? It makes his elimination so much more interesting!

Well, perhaps because it's actually pretty heartbreaking, in the light of how things turned out. That's not a TV producer talking, of course; it's a moral human being talking. Sometimes the two voices work at cross purposes. This is, apparently, one of those occasions. When a guy portrayed as a rustic amateur cook with a tragic background turns out, apparently, to be a rustic amateur cook with a tragic background, that's not entertaining — it's like burning a puppy with a cigarette and laughing at it for being startled.

Lessons one can extract from the episode:

1. The producers of Top Chef are pitiless puppy-burners with malfunctioning souls. Future contestants should prepare themselves for humiliation and soul-crushing failure. If they'll cast a guy like Clay just so viewers will cry themselves to sleep over the dude's implosion, they'll do anything.

2. Don't cut your boar chops too thin, and don't par-cook them with 40 minutes to go in the competition. Bring 'em thick, juicy and on time.

3. Season three of Top Chef has a lot of potential. Hung, Tre and Micah — in particular — all seem to have raging talent, and Hung has a fierce attitude that actually seems to have some substance behind it. The relatively old and heavily New York City-stacked cast implies people who have already knocked some serious heads in the kitchen.

Pour one out for Clay, don't let your friends apply for the show's tryouts, and tune in for the next episode.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)