One of Gordon Ramsay’s most popular reality shows, Hell’s Kitchen, is still on its longest hiatus yet. Following the show’s 18th season, which aired through the fall of 2018 and winter of 2019, Hell’s Kitchen was renewed for a 19th and 20th season by Fox. However, now nearing the end of 2019, that 19th season still has yet to air and was quietly left out of the fall schedule when it was expected to premiere.
Hell’s Kitchen has rarely had a consistent schedule during its run. In the past, seasons have started in the fall, winter, spring, and summer. Once in a while, it will have two seasons in one year, though usually it’ll just be one. The show is clearly flexible and not at all a stranger to having its scheduled shifted around. However, taking over thirteen months to have another season premiere is unprecedented, leaving a lot of questions from viewers who were waiting for more episodes in September. Season 19 is known to have finished filming back in the spring of 2019, so now it’s spent more than enough time in the oven – so to speak.
This is actually the case, because back in 2018 Fox made an agreement to air WWE’s Smackdown Live starting in the fall of the next year. On October 4, 2019, WWE’s Smackdown was placed as the main course in Fox’s Friday night schedule. That’s what presented an issue for Hell’s Kitchen. For the past several years, it has most often aired on Friday nights, so now, with the two hour long WWE showing being placed there instead, Hell’s Kitchen was left without a home in the fall.
This isn’t the only program that this has had an effect on either. The same is happening for the sitcom Last Man Standing, which Fox premiered the latest season of in September of 2018, but has now been pushed to start its next season on January 2, 2020. There’s been plenty of shifting around. Notifications of these shifts in the schedule were fairly limited and quiet, but after a small amount of digging around, the reasons for this all was simple and not a major need for concern from longtime fans.
For Hell’s Kitchen, there is unfortunately still no exact start date being given out. Obviously it isn’t canceled, given the renewal and season filming, so at the very least expect Gordon Ramsay to be screaming at both the red and blue teams on television once again at some point in 2020. Whether it’s in January, March, June… host Gordon Ramsay will surely have not missed a beat. The cast will likely be all new chefs after the most recent season had half returnees, while the one before that was entirely returnees, and odds are high that those new chefs will be undercooking risotto, overcooking beef Wellington, forgetting to add lamb sauce, and will never hear the end of it from their host. Eventually, next year, Hell’s Kitchen will be back, feeling as though it never left.
