I Hate ‘Great British Baking Show’—And Can’t Stop Watching

New This Week

Help me stop watching terrible TV.

What Angela Lansbury meant to me. (Sappy alert!)

All I can think about is negronis.

The Glee drama never ends.

Voldemort rises again.

Why Do We Keep Watching Bad TV?

I think we all remember where we were when the international incident took place.

Me? After another long, arduous week, I had nestled into the nook of my couch, turned on my TV, and prepped my body and soul for healing. I was ready for my lil’ blip of Friday night happiness—the antidote to the fever of stress that threatens to overcome without this ritual. It was time to watch the new episode of my beloved Great British Baking Show on Netflix.

But what I witnessed that night has shaken me to my core. My perception of the world as I thought I knew it has changed forever. The trust issues this global catastrophe has instilled may never be undone. Will I ever recover? Will any of us?

The first sight when the episode began was such a shock. It was almost too upsetting to believe it was real. But it was, unfortunately. On last week’s Great British Baking Show, it was “Mexico Week,” and there were hosts Matt Lucas and Noel Fielding, two white Englishmen dressed in stereotypical ponchos and sombreros. Were they making fun of Spanish-speaking accents, too? You bet your soggy bottom they were.

In the Year of Our Chalamet 2022, one of most high-profile television programs in the U.K.—one of the biggest in the world, really—began a new episode with blatantly racist jokes that, aside from being offensive and in bad taste, have famously gotten dozens of celebrities, politicians, and public figures fired from their jobs in recent years. Worse, the series was framing an entire episode around a theme that, given the history of the show, would practically litter the baking tent with landmines to set off. And that they did.

The carnage was brutal.

On the list of offenses: The treatment of “Mexican food” as if it was a cuisine beamed down from space for humans to try for the first time. The reduction of the culture to “bright colors” and “things that have corn in it.” The pronunciations of “guacamole” and “pico de gallo,” which are too graphic to detail here; our chief GBBS correspondent Fletcher Peters, a war reporter if there ever was one, has done the brave work of detailing the sheer violence of it all.

And forget the cringe-worthy nature of the episode for a second: Why were they making tacos on a baking show?!

It was one of the worst hours of television I’ve seen in a long time. I hated every second of it. And I can’t wait to tune into this week’s new episode once I’m wrapped with work on Friday.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we stay loyal to shows long after they start to actively make us angry—let alone when they are objectively bad? There are more shows on TV right now than one could feasibly watch over their entire lifetime, yet we remain dedicated to being furious about the garbage we won’t just throw out.

I think about this a lot, although this GBBS travesty has brought it into sharp focus.

I’ve been aggravated by this show, one that used to be the very best thing that television had to offer, for years. Lucas and Fielding’s bits are unwatchable and antithetical to the original spirit of the series. Challenges have veered aggressively toward Pinterest-ready showstoppers and away from the heartwarming test of how well a self-taught home baker can create these classic things. Eliminations started making no sense; at one point, there were conspiracy theories that producers wanted to keep young, attractive contestants longer. And the producers seem to have lost the plot completely. This is a show about baking. Pray tell: Why are we making pizzas and tacos?

Apparently, this week’s new episode will feature a cruelly difficult technical challenge. I will likely throw a conniption while watching. But make no mistake—what is wrong with me?—I will be watching.

I think a lot of us can relate to this. When a new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race is on, for example, episode drops are an event. If I’m not with friends while watching it, we’re texting about it together and absolutely tweeting about it with other fans. The general content of these messages: What in the living hell is going on with this godforsaken show?!

Few fan bases are as devoted to and angered by the series they love than Drag Race fans. Each new season runs as if producers have shredded the rule books from 15 different games, then pieced them back together randomly to establish the new cycle’s overly complicated, incredibly irritating format. Producer intervention each week is so blatant, they should just have producers narrate at this point. And yet, we will never stop watching.

This is a case where, when it’s good, it’s really good, as in the recent All-Stars season. But, oh, the suffering to get to that point.

There’s a similar shared vibe with fans of the Real Housewives franchise, who turn watching each respective series into a weekly venting session of which cast member is the most hateable and unwatchable. And we will all convene this weekend at BravoCon (I’ll be moderating! Come see me!) to ecstatically celebrate these people we apparently loathe.

It’s almost a pathology, and it’s not limited to reality TV.

There are times while watching Apple TV+’s The Morning Show when I reflexively lept from my couch and began pacing my apartment because I was so disgusted by how ludicrous a plot twist was.

I hear that people still watch The Handmaid’s Tale, an act of self-masochism if I’ve ever heard of one.

And let’s not forget when we were all compulsively watching And Just Like That…: The Sex and the City sequel was a rare unifiying event in our culture, where everyone held hands and wailed in unison, “WHAT DID THEY DO TO MY CHERISHED MIRANDA HOBBS?!” Then we’d all clear our calendars to make sure we watched the next episode as soon as it was released.

My friend Louis Peitzman recently posted a prompt on Twitter that was a variation of this, asking, “What's the worst TV show that you watch?” Not a guilty pleasure series, he specified, but a genuinely terrible show. He received hundreds of responses, naming shows as varied as The Walking Dead and Sister Wives.

I’ll never understand it, yet I am just like them. Haven’t we learned that life is too short? Don’t I, of all people, know that there is so much great content to be watching instead?

In any case, I’ll see you all on Wednesday night when the new American Horror Story season premieres. We learn nothing.

Tale as Old as Time…

I’ve spent my lifetime being comforted by Angela Lansbury.

A proper millennial, my first introduction to Lansbury, who died this week at age 96, was when she voiced Mrs. Potts in the animated film Beauty and the Beast. By that point, she was already a legend: an Oscar nominee, a Broadway dame, and a household name.

To the child version of me, she was warmth personified. Her mumsy tenderness exuded from this singing, talking teapot, like the steam from a drink the character herself might pour. She created a Mrs. Potts that was on our level and familiar, but Lansbury brought with that an awe-inducing gravitas.

She reassures Belle. She dotes on Chip. She calms the Beast. But make no mistake about the regality she’s earned: When Mrs. Potts starts singing the first bars to “Beauty and the Beast,” it was clear that she was ushering in something important. Even I knew that, and when I first saw this movie I couldn’t even tie my shoes. She announced that we were about to watch one of the grandest sequences in cinematic history, something that would change our lives. And, because she’s Angela Lansbury, we felt safe and welcome basking in the moment, letting the wonder of it all wash over us.

I remember at the end of the number “Something There,” Mrs. Potts sings, “There must be something there that wasn’t there before,” and Chip asks, “What’s there, mama?” “I’ll tell you when you’re older,” she tells him, which was enough to satisfy me then.

Now that I am older and understand the wild swirl of complicated feelings she was winking at—love happening outside the window—I still turn to that little aside. Along the journey to whatever “happy ever after” means for me, I’ve needed that bolstering from Mrs. Potts. After every bump, there’s a new lesson. What is it exactly? “I’ll tell you when you’re older.” There’s still hope.

But there was more than just Beauty and the Beast. In Bedknobs and Broomsticks, she comforted me: It’s OK to take risks. Bob along on the bottom of the beautiful briny sea; it might be the best thing you ever do.

I first heard a song from Sweeney Todd as a lullaby. “Not While I’m Around” comforted me in obvious ways that a lullaby would, so many times. Later in life, Lansbury’s revelatory Mrs. Lovett comforted me by helping me realize you can be loving and still have a dark streak…if maybe not as dark as hers.

When I discovered all of the classic clips of her performing on Broadway, especially in Mame, I was reassured that being brassy, unapologetic, and campy will, somewhere—if not where I was right then—be celebrated.

Lansbury was astonishing. Watch Gaslight and The Manchurian Candidate. For the love of God, stop watching reruns of Law & Order: SVU and binge Murder She Wrote instead. I thought about this same thing when Betty White died: She meant as much to me as she meant to many generations before me. Will kids today have that connection with a performer on this scale, with this kind of longevity? Will my little nephews have that?

I mean, my nephews will be forced to watch Golden Girls episodes with me, whether they like it or not. And if my mother and sister have anything to say about it, Mrs. Potts will be a formidable part of their childhoods. But every time someone so special like this passes, it’s heartbreaking in a different way—if that makes any sense. Maybe I’ll figure out what I mean by that…when I’m older.

The Drink Order That Caused an Internet War

At some point in my life, I convinced myself that a negroni is delicious. It might have coincided with my early onset alcoholism. (Who could say?!) But I know the negroni is, in a word, polarizing. It’s with this knowledge that I watched the internet erupt into a violent frenzy over a negroni-centric viral video.

House of the Dragonstars Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke did a promotional interview for HBO where they interviewed each other, asking innocuous questions like, “what’s your favorite drink?” Alcohol hasn’t broken the internet in this fashion since Kim Kardashian defied physics to spray champagne onto her butt.

“Negroni. Sbagliato. With prosecco in it,” D’Arcy purred. (This is a real drink; in a sbagliato, the prosecco substitutes for the gin.) Half the internet acted like D’Arcy had just created some new kind of pornography: Their delivery is so sumptuous, and their choice of cocktail is so alluring and cool. The other half acted as if D’Arcy had created the coronavirus pandemic themself.

There’s a fun explainer on all of this drama—inexplicably, there is drama!—here. I’m just glad that this is the controversy of the week. All things considered, it’s a treat. A treat like, one might say, a negroni…sbagliato…with…

We Should Stop Believing

The juiciest and most consequential gossip surrounding a TV series at the moment stems from a series that went off the air seven years—and that most people wrote off as nerdy or embarrassing. Fellow Gleeks, the vindication is sweet.

OK, reveling in this might be in poor taste. There is so much tragedy that has happened to its cast. The Lea Michele drama is complicated, to say the least. (She’s so good in Funny Girl! She was so bad to many people!) Years since the show went off the air, Michele’s fellow Glee alums are showing the most public cattiness since Bette Davis and Joan Craword when it comes to her success on Broadway.

Discovery+ just announced a docuseries about all of this. It will probably be tawdry and exploitative. Give it to me like a Slushie to the face.

Accio: Some Sense!

Harry Potter fans—at least the ones with a conscience—have a hard time reconciling their love of the franchise with the surging hatefulness of its creator. I’m personally in a constant, evolving relationship with that predicament. But this latest tweet from the author is food for thought.

Inside Amy Schumer: One of the funniest, smartest sketch series…ever?...finally comes back. (Thurs. on Paramount+)

Halloween Ends: Funnily enough, “Halloween ends” are the two greatest words this Spooky Season Grinch could hear. (Now in theaters and on Peacock)

Love Is Blind : I beg of all of you to find something more interesting to be ironically obsessed with. (Wed. on Netflix)

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