Is 2020 to blame for The Great British Baking Show's disappointing season?

Eater

"Despite the efforts and welcomed (sort of) addition of Matt Lucas, something about Season 11 feels, well, underbaked and underproofed," says Madeleine Davies of this season, adding: "It could be that the challenges have been leaning less and less on classic baking and more on viral Instagram foods (like the rainbow bagels), though this is hardly the first time that the show has gotten stunt-y. Then there’s the fact that none of the bakers could figure out brownies in the same episode — Season 11, Chocolate Week — that Leith insulted New York chocolate babka. This wouldn’t be a big deal in other shows, but considering that Bake Off’s biggest scandal was two bakers apologizing to one another and both claiming fault over a ruined baked Alaska, Leith’s verbal assault on a New York City delicacy might as well have reignited the Battle of Bunker Hill. There’s also a nagging bother for me personally as Bake Off’s judges and hosts — a group that, unlike the bakers, has been steadily and frustratingly white throughout the series’s run— have slowly gone from three women (hosts Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc and judge Mary Berry) and one man (Hollywood) to three men (Fielding, Lucas, and Hollywood) and one woman (Leith). Whereas Perkins and Giedroyc seemed to rankle Hollywood on occasion, the current hosts are mostly reverent towards him, almost like he was the literal king of all bread. And of course, there was that brief and lovely period of the show where Fielding co-hosted with Sandi Toksvig, but that was all too short (pausing for a Fielding-esque joke about Toksvig’s diminutive height here). This isn’t a critique on Lucas. He is doing fine as a new co-host — though if there was even the slightest chance of Toksvig returning, I wouldn’t hesitate to shove him into a current, assuming that he’s a strong enough swimmer to get back to London. Maybe the issue isn’t the show, at all, but rather proof of how hard this year has been. 2020 has been such a sh*t show that the The Great British Bake Off no longer works as visual valium."

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• Critics of this season are asking too much of The Great British Baking Show: "I did not set out to become a Great British apologist, but I did go back and watch a random episode from the supposed glory days (season three, episode six): The technical was flaounas. Nobody had heard of those, either," says  Rachel Sugar. "Is it not remotely possible that our dissatisfaction with this season is not, in fact, about Great British Bake Off, which is a still basically enjoyable show about nice British people baking, but instead with the world outside the tent? If I cannot get excited about the craftsmanship of Laura’s showstopping caged tart, is that because the show 'isn’t what it used to be,' or because I am distracted by a deadly pandemic and a terrifying election and the fact that I have barely left the house in seven months and have developed the attention span of a three-month-old goldendoodle and the emotional bandwidth of a stunted gnat? (I’ll concede: It could be both.) For all that the season has tried to recapture normalcy, there is only so much that it can do."
• Here's a five-point manifesto on fixing The Great British Baking Show