The new Fox TV reality program Kitchen Nightmares is, like the Fox summer reality series Hell’s Kitchen, an American version of a British program featuring the charismatic and terrifying UK chef Gordon Ramsay.

As with Hell’s Kitchen, the new program takes the concept of the UK version and amps everything up to eleven. The spoiled food is uglier, the facilities are in more dismaying disrepair, the kitchens are filthier, and the villains are even more pathologically unfit for their positions. There have been accusations that the producers have faked some of the more florid horrors depicted in the series, and that is a matter for the courts to sort out. From a viewer’s perspective, however, what we see in the program most certainly tells the truth about various aspects of the American character of our time.

Whereas the British series showed Ramsay working with business-ignorant knuckleheads whose mismanagement of their restaurants showed the weakness of Britain’s entrepreneurial culture—with owners assuming that customers will come flocking for inferior and in some cases dangerous products—Kitchen Nightmares concentrates on character problems, which seem to be the great American disease of our time.

The main problem is simply self-control. In the premiere episode, which was shown on Fox last night at 9 EDT, the manager of a family-owned Italian restaurant did no work at all, skimmed huge amounts of money on a regular basis even when the resturant was operating at a loss (which was most of the time), and regularly threatened both bill collectors and kitchen staff with grevious bodily harm—he’s a huge, muscular guy who is both immensely vain and going to seed.

Ultimately, after a good many ghastly revelations and amazing personal conflicts among all parties, plus a jarring sequence reminscent of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (in which the owners go all gooey and weak-need at Ramsay’s supplying them with a new, actually functioning kitchen), Ramsay gets the group working together to put out a new, homestyle menu and stop poisoning people.

Even the thuglike manager changes his ways, and all is well at the end. It’s a very American story in which the central characters ultimately put aside their selfish ways and learn to work together for the greater good. It’s also not the least bit convincing, as one must seriously doubt that the manager will remain on good behavior for very long.

But that’ a matter to be taken up by the inevitable American remake of the British series Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares Revisited, in which he returns to the restaurant after six months to see if the lessons took.

Character will out, after all, and Kitchen Nightmares does a good job of presenting that reality, regardless of how true the details may turn out to be.