A comedy of errors, fresh from the oven

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This article was published 17/03/2018 (3070 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new cooking show now available on Netflix, Nailed It!, is a sweet surprise.

A good-natured reproach to the meanness of reality TV and a goofy antidote to the cult of precious, perfect Pinterest-ready food, the series is fresh, fun and knowingly silly.

Nailed It! is organized like a competition, with three eagerly incompetent bakers and three enormously forgiving judges. The show is not really competitive at all, though, functioning more as a friendly celebration of epic fails.

With its comic look at complete baking disasters, the show inverts the usual premises of food TV. The title references a popular meme, usually a self-deprecating admission that you tried to make, say, a Pikachu birthday cake, but ended up instead with some pop-eyed yellow monstrosity.

All the while, the series sneakily explores the common North American belief that knowledge, skill and practice are overrated and you can do anything if you just have enthusiasm, optimism and the right attitude. This is, of course, a terrible idea — responsible for all sorts of mischief and flim-flammery.

The particular dopey genius of Nailed It! is that it presents this cherished ideal and then blows it right up, all in the nicest possible way.

That’s the thing about this wacky show. Everyone is so nice.

The contestants are nice. One competitor wants to bake to “impress the ladies.” Another likes to unwind at the end of the day by “baking and drinking.” They all share an earnest but vague desire to be excellent bakers, but good intentions only get you so far in baking, which is a precision game.

The prizes are nice, being the modest sort you might remember from 1970s Canadian game shows — an electric mixer, a cake-decorating set. There is a grand prize of US$10,000 awarded in each episode, which is enough to make the winner cry happy tears but not enough to make the contest ugly.

The judges are nice. Host Nicole Byer’s background is in improv comedy, Jacques Torres is a pastry chef and chocolatier, and the pair is joined on each episode by a guest judge. Torres, who would probably be “the stern one” on any other cooking show, presides over the kitchen confusion of Nailed It! with perplexity and gentle concern.

At one point, a contestant forgets the flour — the flour! — in her cake batter and blithely pops everything into the oven. “That is basically an omelette,” Torres points out to the other judges, in rueful tones.

When it comes time to examine the outcomes of all this adorable ineptitude, the judges struggle to think of something — anything! — kind to say. Contestants are commended for their “interesting” results, or even just for “trying hard.”

“What do you think went well?” one judge asks a baker, faced with a particularly disastrous confection.

Fortunately, nobody feels really bad about failing because it’s clear that everyone is set up to fail. The show requires its hapless amateurs to do things such as create three-tier wedding cakes with stencil-work and life-like flowers with only vague directions and a limited amount of time.

The resulting urgency — which on another show would be self-serious, super-competitive and scored with dramatic music — plays here as madcap farce. Characters are constantly dropping things and setting things on fire, but with a refreshing oh-what-the-heck attitude.

This casual approach is catching. At one point, guest judge Jay Chandrasekhar (from Super Troopers) has a child-care issue and has to leave, leaving Nicole to wonder whether he’ll be back in time for the judging. “We’re like the Nailed It! of TV shows,” she admits.

In place of the usual scripted quips of reality TV, the show offers authentic laughs, nothing being funnier than the baking “reveals” — so melting, toppling, gloppy and alarmingly coloured. There is a terrifying cake princess and a supposedly heart-shaped cake pop that resembles a crime scene photo. “This looks like it was ripped from a human body,” Nicole says — again, in the nicest possible way.

It’s hilariously shambolic, but still somehow positive, the show’s essential sweetness coming out in the finale, in which the bakers attempt to recreate a cake topped by U.S. President Donald Trump’s head. Pro-Trump and anti-Trump politics are set aside in a cheerful, all-American embrace of non-partisan incompetence.

“Bake America Great Again!” one says contestant. Well, exactly.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca