Based on Anthony Bourdain's autobiographical book of the same name, Kitchen Confidential was a fictionalized look at all the crazy crap that happens to you when you work in a restaurant. Sometimes you get robbed at gunpoint by masked marauders, sometimes Vaughn from Alias shows up and starts sleeping with your head waitress and sabotaging you, sometimes one of the kitchen staff's fingers gets chopped off and everyone slips around on his blood -- it is mayhem in the culinary world!

But the plots weren't really what made the show so immensely enjoyable. What was great about it was its awesome cast -- Xander from Buffy, John Francis Daley of Freaks and Geeks, John Cho, Jaime King in a surprisingly likable and funny performance, that sassy Brit Owain Yeoman of The Mentalist and Generation Kill, and, of course, a fresh-faced Bradley Cooper as the pointlessly pseudonymed Jack Bourdain -- as well as some of the tightest, smartest comedy writing I've ever seen on television. Xander sometimes went a little too far into Xander mode overdrive and Bonnie Sommerville was annoying as hell, but other than those two things, the show was ridiculously near perfect. If you're not getting why Bradley Cooper is being thrust into superstardom at the moment, this is probably the best and quickest explanation as to why that has always been inevitable and deserved.