Alton Brown hosts “Cutthroat Kitchen: Superstar Sabotage”

We all know the old saying: "if at first you don't succeed, try again." Typically, it's meant to inspire us after a failure, to persuade us to pick ourselves up, to dust ourselves off and make another attempt at whatever it was we were trying to do.

It may be time to add a new saying to our lexicon: "if at first you do succeed, keep on doing it because clearly you're doing something right."

I really don't think that anyone could deny that "Cutthroat Kitchen" has been a big hit for the Food Network. The Alton Brown-hosted culinary competition premiered to great fanfare barely a year ago, and it's already on its fifth season. That's one heck of an accomplishment for anything on television, and with new episodes being turned out with such surprising speed, it was really only a matter of time before the stars of the culinary world sat up and took notice.

"Cutthroat Kitchen's" first tournament, "Superstar Sabotage," launches Wednesday, Oct. 8, on the Food Network, and with some significant money on the line for deserving charities, the stakes are high for the celebrity chefs who will be competing.

In a format similar to some of the network's other competitions, each weekly episode will feature four chefs going head-to-head to out-cook and out-sabotage each other in a race to claim the cash prize for a charity of their choosing. Then, in the fifth and final episode on Wednesday, Nov. 5, the winners of the four previous episodes will duke it out under Alton Brown's watchful eye as they do whatever it takes to win up to $75,000 -- for charity, of course.

With 16 famous TV chefs ready to face the heat, there'll be a lot of familiar faces on the screen. Jeff Mauro ("Sandwich King"), Nadia G ("Bite This With Nadia G"), Anne Burrell ("Secrets of a Restaurant Chef") and Alex Guarnaschelli ("Iron Chef America") are just a few of the popular TV personalities who've agreed to subject themselves to the diabolical sabotages that are dredged from the mind of Alton Brown.

Of course, despite the sabotage, the backstabbing and the evil cackles coming from Brown, "Cutthroat Kitchen" is all in good fun, and this superstar installment is most certainly for a good cause. They say that you can't have too much of a good thing, and you can see "Cutthroat Kitchen" is living proof of that when it premieres its "Superstar Sabotage" tournament Wednesday, Oct. 8, on the Food Network.