bury me with the great british baking show

in praise of manufactured, nerve-wracking reality tv

It’s back, baby. Everyone’s favorite weighted-blanket of a TV show—The Great British Baking Show or GBBO—has a new season airing weekly on Netflix right now.

I don’t think I need to explain what the show is about at this point. It has been an internet sensation for close to a decade now.

But if you are somehow magically subscribed to my newsletter without ever having seen it or heard of it: The Great British Baking Show is a reality competition show where amateur bakers from all over the UK compete to prove who is the best home baker through a series of baking challenges. The weekly challenges take place in a tent retrofitted with ovens and kitchen sets, inexplicably set during the summertime on the CGI-altered kelly green lawn of some manor estate in England.

It is wholesome, earnest, humble, and sweet, with just enough saucy innuendos to keep you giggling but still cute enough for your kids to watch.

But one thing everyone who watches this show will tell me is that they find it soothing.

I do too. I loved baking growing up, and I still do now. Arguably, I like it better than normal cooking. You follow a recipe—formed out of a set of rules determined by chemical ratios—and you can create something spectacular out of everyday objects. After all, flour, salt, yeast, and water are, when manipulated correctly, the foundations for bread.

There is comfort in knowing that once you know the correct steps and conditions to take, you can make all kinds of customizations and iterations to create something entirely your own. In other words: if you follow the rules, you (mostly) get your desired result.

But of course, if you’ve ever baked anything, you know that even following the recipe can only take you so far. GBBO fans are very aware that chocolate week is always a wild card week—any slightly off temperatures can ruin your chocolate work. Humidity can ruin the most perfect sugar work during sweets week. There are a thousand elements outside of your control, and half the work of the show is trying to anticipate them all, to heartbreaking and hilarious effect. Your great-grandmother’s tried and true banana bread recipe can still go off the rails for the slightest fault even if you make it every single day for years on end. In other words: the best bakers are perfectionists, but also over-thinkers. And even still, that’s not always enough to save their bakes.

And sure, the whole thing is manufactured by producers to make the challenges seem far more anxiety-producing than they really are. The editing of participants nearly running out of time is clearly rigged. It’s not a perfect show and it doesn’t pretend to be.

That being said I’ll never forgive them for making the bakers create biscuit busts of famous celebrities including, for some reason, Tom DeLonge.

if i had to bear witness to this than so do you.

(And let’s not forget that apparently the week this newsletter is published will be…Mexican week? Complete with “juan” jokes? Who thought this was a good idea?)

So despite all of this, why oh why is a show where a bunch of amateur bakers battle and anticipate all the elements that could go wrong actually…soothing?