I was prepared to hate, or at least be supremely bored by, Top Chef Masters, Bravo's spinoff of its popular cooking competition show. From the first moments of the first episode, it struck me as so derivative that I thought the entire genre might have jumped the shark.

A ''culinary clash of the titans''? If that's not a direct quote from Iron Chef America, itself a lesser spinoff of a cult Japanese hit, it sure sounds like one. But while Iron Chef features stars famous enough to be known as merely Mario or Morimoto, Masters gives us the likes of Michael Schlow, Graham Elliot Bowles, Wilo Benet and Suzanne Tracht, well-regarded American chefs but certainly not household names.

The rest of the setup felt formulaic, too. There's the stick-thin robo-host, in this case New York TV personality Kelly Choi, and on the judges' panel, the sassy man (Saveur's James Oseland), the sassy woman (former New York magazine critic Gael Greene) and the token Brit (The London Observer's Jay Rayner).

SAME STYLE

Masters is running in Top Chef's 10 p.m. time slot on Wednesdays, and Bravo has used the same production style, including the fisheye lens, sped-up traffic shots and product placement, as the original show. And from the get-go, it all seemed a little forced.

But as the drama unfolded, I started to get hooked. The moment my skepticism faded wasn't when Schlow struggled so much with his dessert that the flop sweat flowed more easily than his chocolate sauce. It wasn't when Aureole chef Christopher Lee said of one particularly tough Girl Scout helping judge the desserts: 'This is The New York Times' food critic 20 years from now.''

It was during the elimination challenge, which had the chefs cooking food in dorm rooms with hot plates, microwaves and toaster ovens. When Hubert Keller of San Francisco's Fleur de Lys took a pot of hot pasta into the shower and used the spray nozzle to cool it, a brilliant solution to a limited-equipment problem, I was ready to give the show a chance.

Seeing how the pros hold up (or don't) under pressure, in fact, turns out to be the biggest appeal of Top Chef Masters. These are chefs who have run acclaimed restaurants for years, even decades, and anybody in that position possesses a healthy if not extreme ego.

So when they slip up the way molecular gastronomist Wylie Dufresne of wd-50 did in Episode Two, I couldn't help but get a jolt of perverse satisfaction. Dufresne, one of the bigger names to appear on the show so far, was particularly intimidating in his own guest-judge appearances on Top Chef, which made his rushing around and cursing in this show all the more entertaining. When he left the chicken off one judge's plate, his wide-eyed expression of horror said it all: No immersion circulator or liquid-nitrogen machine could save him now.

One of the main differences between Masters and the original show is that these chefs are playing for their favorite charities. Another is that each episode features a new group of four chefs, with one of them winning a chance to come back in a few weeks for the championship round. Both differences sap the show of some of its much-needed tension. The chefs don't become characters whom viewers get to know, so we don't care as much as we should about whether they win or lose.

MAKING FUN

Still, Bravo has managed to make the efforts watchable enough, if for no other reason than the chance to make fun of seasoned professionals. Did Keller really misplace his grocery cart in Whole Foods? Does Fort Worth's Tim Love really not know how to make pork stew without pre-ground pork? Is Frenchman Ludo Lefebvre really going to make quesadillas in competition with Rick Bayless, renowned for his Mexican cooking?

So far, the winners have been the coolest customers: Keller and Tracht, who barely cracked a smile when she won. In this week's episode, a confident Bayless would seem hard to beat.

When they're in front of the judges, the chefs so far have taken criticism much better than many of their Top Chef counterparts. That makes for less drama, but it's oddly reassuring, too. Is that mind-set one of the keys to a chef's success? I hope the next group of Top Chef contestants is watching.

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