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The fourth season of Top Chef Masters was announced on May 24, 2012. Food and travel journalist, Krista Simmons, and features editor of Gilt Taste, Francis Lam, joined James Oseland and Ruth Reichl as new additions to the judges’ table. The season premiered on July 25, 2012 with 12 award-winning chefs competing in weekly challenges to win $100,000 for their charity and the title of Top Chef Master (see Wikipedia)

Top Chef Masters is produced for Bravo Media by the Emmy Award-winning Magical Elves with Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz serving as executive producers.

FINALE UPDATE – 27 September, 2012

Wednesday night saw the finale of the fourth season of Top Chef Masters, its lowest rated season of the four seasons that this Top Chef spin off has aired. Each successive season has rated lower than the previous one, showing either a malaise with the format or the strength of competing shows on other networks. The finale episode was viewed by 1,018,000 and scored a 18-49 demo rating percentage of 0.50. With a growth in viewers over the previous week’s 9^th episode of some 27%, on the face of it, that’s seems a pretty decent result. As always the devil is in the details.

This season also saw the lowest average viewership of all seasons; Season 4 averaged just 951,800 viewers per episode with a 0.43 percentage rating in the 18-49 demo. This is a -19.51% drop in total viewers versus Season 3 and a -25.58% drop in the 18-49 demo.

UPDATE – 20 September, 2012

For Bravo & their food advertisers no doubt Top Chef Seattle, can’t come soon enough, as the ratings for the Curtis Stone hosted shows continue in the doldrums. Last night’s 9^th episode of this season’s Top Chef Masters was its second worst for this season AND the series as a whole, as just 803,000 viewers tuned in. Even more depressing is that it only scored 0.30 in the 18-49 demo. Season-to-date this 4^th season is now trending down almost 20% in total audience versus last season and a massive -26.92 in the 18-49 demo. (And that’s approaching this seasons RHoNY demo drop of -28.19%.) In our weekly forecast we had thought that this episode of TCM would hold steady with last week’s 883,000, and gave a range of 850-900k, but sadly it didn’t even reach the bottom of our range.

UPDATE – 13 September, 2012

Sadly another disappointing ratings return from this week’s Top Chef Masters, which for episode 8 of the 4^th season only attracted 883,000 viewers and a 18-49 demo of 0.40. After exceeding 1m viewers in each of the ten episodes from Season 3, so far 4 episodes in Season 4 have been below 1m and in fact all four have been below 900,000. Season-to-date the average after 8 episodes is just 962,125 viewers and a demo of 0.44. That’s a whopping 17.64% down in total audience and in the 18-49 demo, which is how Bravo sets their ad rates, the negative territory being reached is almost 24% at 23.91.

UPDATE – 13 August, 2012

Proof of that ‘past sell-by-date’ phenomena is this season’s Top Chef: Masters. Although it’s only in its fourth season, that comes on top of 9 seasons of Top Chef as well as 2 of Top Chef:Just Desserts. In its 2 weeks up against the Olympics, it has continued to shed viewers dropping an additional 110,000 (-12,85%) this week, to a new series low. This being hot on the heels of the disappointing debut of Around the World in 80 Plates, will not do host Curtis Stone’s reputation any good as a long term ratings winner for Bravo.

UPDATE – 7 September, 2012

On Wednesday night Top Chef Masters was up against President Bill Clinton’s address to the Democratic National Convention and whether or not that detracted from TCM’s audience, it does provide Bravo Execs some cover. Just 874,000 viewers tuned in (0.40 18-49 demo) for the 10pm showing and that’s some 31% lower than the comparable episode in it’s previous season. Through seven episodes this fourth season of Top Chef Masters is heading to be its lowest rated season ever, as the season average is now 973,429 some 16.55% down in total audience numbers and a larger 21.85% in the important 18-49 demo. After the relative failure of Around the in 80 Plates, Bravo’s food advertisers will be beginning to wonder what’s going wrong with Bravo and may start moving their advertising dolar elsewhere.

UPDATE – 2 August 2012

The ratings news was quite bad for Top Chef Masters after its impressive debut last week, as this week’s 2nd episode dropped 30% from the prior week down to just 856,000 with an 0.4 18-49 demo percentage. The last time the ratings were that low, was the 3rd episode of the 2nd season, which aired in April 2010 scoring 868,000 viewers.

On top of the disappointing ratings for the recently finished Around the World in 80 Plates, Bravo will start wondering whether it’s these shows’ formats that aren’t working or whether the host of both, Curtis Stone, isn’t proving to be the draw Andy Cohen thought he was.

UPDATE – 27 July 2012

With Around the World in 80 Plates having wrapped up its freshman season last Wednesday, Curtis Stone didn’t stay off Bravo hosting duties for long as he returned this Wednesday as host of the 4th season of Top Chef Masters. Season 3 of TCM, which aired April to June 2011, averaged 1,182,500 viewers at the same 10pm time slot, scoring 0.58 in the 18-49 demo. The premiere for Season 3 opened with 1,010,000 and 0.50 demo, and Season four’s premiere topped that by 10% with 1,112,000 viewers tuning in. Despite the increase in total viewers the demo percentage stayed the same at 0.50. Where Bravo will be thrilled, is that the return of Top Chef Masters, has already rated higher than any episode of 80 Plates, whose highest rated show was the 8th episode, with a total audience of 835,000.

Source: Nielsen Media Research via TVByTheNumbers