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In the tradition of his hit series Hell's Kitchen, the gloriously abrasive and dictatorial London restauranteur Gordon Ramsey ran many a hapless master chef and his kitchen crew ragged on this weekly, hour-long Fox reality series. Unlike Hell's Kitchen, however, Kitchen Nightmares (based on the British series of the same name) was not a competition-elimination series. Instead, each episode found Ramsay paying a visit to a different restaurant, generally one that had been suffering from dwindling profits and a diminishing clientele. With ruthless efficiency, Ramsey swiftly straightened out whatever problems the establishment was having, completely overhauled the menu, reassigned staff members to jobs more suitable to their individual talents, and summarily fired such "dead weight" as the owners' parasitical friends and relatives. (it usually took him only one week to get the establishment back on its feet!) In the bargain, he also made short work of the bill collectors, food suppliers and other antagonists who'd been making the owners' lives miserable. For all his bombast and browbeating, Ramsay invariably earned undying respect and loyalty from those owners whose restaurants he saved from bankruptcy, and from those aspiring chefs whose innate skills the host immediately recognized, encouraged and nurtured. Described by the network as a "culinary boot camp", the American version of Kitchen Nightmares opened for business on September 19, 2007.