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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine a TV show about your favorite hobby, no matter if that is cooking, cars, technology or whatever. You wouldn't watch that show unless it had a lot of humans in it, preferably attractive ones, showing their faces.

Except I love "how it's made" type of show, and don't really care about the people involved. Put halloween masks on them all, and I'd still watch.

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My hobby is playing jazz guitar. It's safe to say I'm not going to get many instructional DVD's filled with pretty faces. (Robert Conti anybody?)

Yeah, I love watching Top Gear and attractive isn't the first word in mind when it comes to describing Jeremy Clarkson.

Top Gear is a bad example because whether or not the presenter is attractive is secondary to whether or not they are entertaining. And Clarkson is entertaining. And you see a lot of his face in the presentation of the show.

One of my favorite hobbies is Lucha Libre (mexican wrestling) and it's awesome because dudes have their face covered in bright color masks.

The food network also has a lot of shows that rarely show faces. Ditto anything on Animal Planet.

I would say Food Network shows DO show a lot of faces. They are very much about selling a brand. Just walking through the local Target housewares aisle, I see Rachel Ray, Giada, Paula Deen, Barefoot Contessa, Bobby Flay, etc, all with their own brand of cooking accessories.

Of course you are right, but there are also several shows that spend a lot of camera time on up-close shots of the food and the food preparation process, only occasionally showing the host. Those are the ones that I was referring to.

Iron Chef does a decent job of this. I wish they offered different "cuts" of episodes - I don't care about anything the judges have to say until they're chewing.

Animal Planet shows animal faces. Anything with a recognizable mouth and set of eyes is still pretty engaging to our wetware.

(In fact, I just tried "Animal Planet" on Google images, and got mostly face shots -- human and otherwise.)

Good point, but I was responding to this quote: "You wouldn't watch that show unless it had a lot of humans in it, preferably attractive ones, showing their faces." Not sure why I deserved a downvote.

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