When kids are doing something cute and you get out your camera to document it, their need to please kicks into overdrive and they’ll still be cute of course, but with a noticeable, performative tilt. It’s not necessarily off-putting (because kids are cute!), but you’re seeing a child already, in a tiny, subtle way, not being their authentic self.
This is the exact problem that plagued the new season of The Great British Bake Off, which ended this week. It’s still good old Bake Off, so the three-challenge structure is always going to be a winning formula, but this season was far and away the worst entry in the series, the fault of which I think lies on the poor casting.
At kick-off, there was some buzzy internet controversy over the new season having the youngest cast ever, with only one or two middle age people, and not even a token (and always a fan favorite) elderly person. We love our grandparents! But there were none. (Now, brief sidenote: maybe this means they’re cooking up a Senior Bake Off series, since they already do a Junior Bake Off. The world needs it! Anyway.) This year, everyone on the show was very bright, very young, and very, very, painfully self-aware.
Sure it’s a testament to the outstanding State of the Union of Being a Kid Today in 2019 but more so it’s an indictment of just how much media (in whatever form you want to think of it) has twisted the way we be ourselves for other people. We’re already too clued-in to the act of portrayal and putting a camera on that—on a group of sensitive (soft?), striving (climbing?), thriving (flaunting?) young adults made for a horrific display, with each episode ratcheting up the intensity of just how much these kids did not want you to see their real selves.
Bake Off contestants are rarely as competitive as other reality show contestants out there. They’re more likely to encourage each other rather than sabotage, to speak kind words rather than curse or back-stab, and the show comes closer and closer every year to embracing its function as a personality platform than an actual game to win. Traditionally, the younger the contestant, the more likely they are to recognize the ulterior purposes of the show—the branding, the personality commodification, the virality—and act accordingly.
Kids (myself included—I’m a kid!) have grown up with the internet for the majority of our lives and have been conditioned to recognize all the trappings of an estimable businesses empire in all its branded, franchised glory—be it a soft drink, or, more and more often, an actual human being. As adults now in our twenties and thirties and, jeez, forties, we’ve learned civility offline and online, perhaps better than our parents, certainly better than our grandparents—but a different kind of civility. A kind of politeness as a form of self-curation rather than something more deeply felt—less scrappy fear-of-god and more glowed-up™, logic-minded, fear-of-missing-out. Still shame-based, but less abstract and wishy-washy; definitely less two-faced—and honestly, maybe it’s a good thing! (We’ve all seen firsthand the limits of classic civility when a parent or grandparent gets on the internet and lets loose.)
But it makes for bad TV.
Not a single contestant on Bake Off this year showed their teeth. Everyone had an ulterior motive—whether cashing in on the exposure outright or doing so in a more abstract, subconscious way. No one was there just because they wanted to bake the best pastries/cakes/whatever better than anyone else. No one was even there to make great TV. Fame and glory in the traditional trophy-confetti-woo-woo-#1 sense was left on the back burner and instead the contestants were tripped up in this strange song-and-dance of nailing perfect civility balanced with quirk, generic attractiveness, and emotional intelligence.
Which would all be fine if there was transparency to the charade. Imagine how much better of a show it would have been had one of the more explicitly cordial contestants really explained why they wanted to come off looking good on TV? Imagine if the cameras had caught one of them saying the word “Instagrammable” and gone from there? Imagine the psychic dread and drama that could have been unearthed had one of the contestants confronted the kid who insisted on wearing a buttoned up shirt and tie in every single episode and asked him just what the hell he actually thought he was doing?
I don’t want to see your personal brand before I see you. You can wear a tie. You can be obsessed with Halloween. You can be everybody’s friend. You can hold hands with your pals during every round of judging. Fine. Cute. Sure. If that’s the reality you want to construct for yourself on this reality TV show, that’s OK, that’s safe, but for the audience it’s truly deadening because we know that veneer is only half the calculus at play.
OK, it’s a baking show, I know. It has to be cute. And normally none of this would be cause for complaint except in this season the ultra-sharp self-awareness actually got in the way of the baking. There were multiple breakdowns, and not just small, simple tears. The first few stemmed from the normal failures and mishaps in the kitchen (the over/under baked pie/cake, the artful set piece falling apart in slow motion), but as their frequency increased as the season went along, the rawer and more uncomfortable they became. A good cry from a contestant, which would normally be endearing and cathartic for the viewer, became uncomfortable and hard to watch, inspiring sympathy still, but also this blog post to try to figure out what is going on with us. Us kids! The final episode with its multiple meltdowns and panic attacks was a bleak, depressing watch.
Perhaps the answer is deconstruction. Working backwards.
The best reality show on TV right now is Terrace House, a Japanese sensation with a cult following everywhere else in the world that has had plenty of other write-ups explaining just what exactly it is. But what I will say is that the reason it’s so successful with what it does is because it provides its own built-in audience:
Each episode is methodically sliced into vignettes, interrupted by a panel of in-studio commentators who offer up their opinions on what we’ve just seen.
It’s a genius structure that creates an addictive sense of family, an added layer of characters to invest in, a self-correcting feedback loop. The panel’s main purpose is to act as a salve to the “reality” of the people on the main show. The young adults on Terrace House are just as neurotic and self-editing as the contestants on Bake Off, but the entire design of Terrace House is to deconstruct that inhuman environment, to see beyond the automatic artifice the cute kids put on for the camera. The commentator format coupled with the open-ended structure of the main show creates a never ending cycle where a perception is created, then destructed, a persona is introduced, then turned into a person. We see the most human portrayal of a human.
There’s no sense of risk in either of these shows. Both Terrace House and Bake Off have such reliable, low-stakes formats that they could go on churning for years to come, but where Terrace House has a built-in fail-safe keeping its reality in check, Bake Off is wildly off mark, spiraling into an empty shell. Bake Off‘s neurosis is perhaps a natural response to the early reality shows of the 00s, infamous for their exploitation of the id. The shaky, jagged cinematography of a cameraman chasing after a delirious contestant having a meltdown, boom mics bouncing into frame, became almost a trope of the genre. Producers micromanaged (and obviously exploited) these personalities who hadn’t yet been refined by the internet and social media.
Things have changed mostly for the better since then. I’m not saying Bake Off should embrace more grime and lowest-common-denominator drama (although, I would actually love to see some baking sabotage if I’m being honest). I just want it to be realer with its casting. Go after the actual amateur bakers, not the ones with easy book deals in their sights, not the ones who have already, horrifically, begun their brand work. When there’s a breakdown inflamed by artifice, let it flame out, let the whole tent burn down. Give me less self-regulation and more regular old self—with maybe an emphasis on “old”.