Not Even ‘The Great British Baking Show’ Can Cheer Us Up Anymore

Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. [View in Browser]( [Subscribe]( [Image] with Kevin Fallon Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. This Week: - In a real soggy-bottom mood. - The Masked Singer is terrorizing me. - Dolly Parton may save us all. - But not if Carole Baskin ruins us first. - Something that made me laugh a lot! What Happened to The Great British Baking Show? It’s been a pummeling few weeks of heart- and hope-bruising news, contributing to an emotional state so brittle that I did, indeed, cry while watching an episode of Guy’s Grocery Games on the Food Network last night. The year 2020 and its soul-shattering twists revealed multiple times this week that there is no floor to its nefariousness, to the point of which, just to keep things food-related, it turns out that Subway—a fast-food indulgence for which we refuse to be shamed—is no longer legally allowed to call its sandwich bookends “bread.” In Ireland, at least, [a court ruled]( that the chain’s recipe contains too much sugar to qualify as a tax-exempt staple food, in fact almost five times the limit that would allow it to be lawfully defined as bread. On top of everything else going on in the world, I now also need to process the fact that I’ve apparently been eating foot-long roast beef cake for the last three decades. [Alternate text] All of this is to say that the return of [The Great British Baking Show]( last week on Netflix should have been a ray of light to grasp at from the dungeon of despair, finally something good to distract, to soothe, to heal. To use a term popularized by the bucolic overseas cooking show, these are real soggy-bottom times. We could all use the metaphorical morale boost of a good bake. This was written before, but will publish after, the new season’s second episode is available stateside. So we can only judge the premiere when we say that, while the retreat to the countryside tent where the biggest care in the world is whether the meringue has achieved proper stiff peaks is a [blissful mental sojourn]( away from the existential carnage of what it means to otherwise be alive right now, there’s something that seems off and oddly dissatisfying about it. Like when the umpteenth baker fails to realize that, yes, of course the rose water is going to “come through” too strong. We’re not the only person to notice this. (TV-critic friends of mine at [USA Today]( and [Decider]( have been on this beat since last season.) But I am a person with rage to channel, so to keep from venting about the few million or so other atrocities of the world right now, I’m going to join their ranks and yell about this instead, knowing full well that I am blowing the slight annoyances of this otherwise delightful little show far out of proportion. It’s dejecting from the start to learn, for example, that the show is not entirely the escapist fantasy we so desperately need right now. It turns out that even in The Great British Baking Show’s famous tent, there is COVID. Much ado is made about the season’s baking “bubble.” The pandemic has forced production, for the first time, to sequester the contestants and judges for the entirety of filming, whereas they used to return to their hometowns and day jobs during the week. This isn’t exactly a revolutionary measure; pretty much every other reality competition series does this, even before anyone knew what coronavirus was. But the contestants going home during the week was one of the show’s most adorable quirks, a doubling down on the notion that these are all amateur bakers whose lives weren’t beholden to reality-TV fame. There’s a new host joining Noel Fielding: Little Britain star Matt Lucas replaces Sandi Tosvig, who departed after last season. If you can stretch your brains back 47 years to when Mel and Sue were the show’s affable co-hosts—it might as well have been that long ago—you remember that the role used to be a bolstering one, echoing the enthusiastic niceness that just seemed to waft through the series like the smell of fresh-baked biscuits. Egged on by Lucas, the new hosts seem to be engaged in some focus-stealing schtick. But there shouldn’t be a schtick. That’s why we, in the land of Sarah Palin dressed as a tie-dyed bear rapping to “Baby Got Back” while Jenny McCarthy shrieks “I dunno, is that Oprah!?”, so appreciated the simple reality series. It was schtick-free. Some people baked cakes. Sometimes they were good. If they weren’t, well that’s OK, too. Good try. That ethos seems to have taken over the challenges, too. If the task at hand each week used to measure if the contestants could competently make classic baked goods, it’s increasingly migrated towards the kind of cake crafting that favors Instagram-ready aesthetics and spectacle over taste and technique. Did I howl with laughter over the tragic [Nailed It!-ready]( results of the premiere’s showstopper challenge, which asked the bakers to make busts of their famous heroes? Absolutely. But at the same time, I’m not watching Nailed It!. It all felt somehow inappropriate, or at least incongruous to the show that we love, cherish, and so desperately need right now. I don’t want to see baking fails! Fails are all around me right now. Show me a nice bake! [Alternate text] (Obviously those are Lupita Nyong’o and Freddie Mercury cakes.) This is much ado about almost nothing. The Great British Baking Show is still fine. I will still watch it each week. And I will engage in the only thing in this world I am still truly passionate about: complaining about it, endlessly. Mickey Rourke, The Masked Singer, and America I desperately try not to engage with The Masked Singer. But like the bill collectors for that gym in Astoria I joined 10 years ago and never canceled my membership to, the show somehow always finds a way to find me. Listen, the series is exceedingly dumb, no matter how much the [critics I respect insist]( its patent absurdity perfectly pairs with our cursed times, no matter how impressive the costuming may be, and no matter how quickly I will YouTube all the clips if I found out that “Lips” from this season is, [as some suspect](, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Lisa Rinna. [Image] I have found myself in this last year watching more reality TV competitions than ever before, and it is in fact that over-produced lameness of so many of them that make them appealing distractions. But not this one. I can’t. Still, the show’s lineup of feathered, fluffed, and maniacal characters is pop culture’s manifestation of the various sleep paralysis demons that haunted me from ages 9 to 33. No matter how hard I try to fight them off or turn away from them, there they are forcing my eyes open, terrorizing me into attention. This week, in a first for the show, the eliminated contestant “[unmasked](” himself. Even for this show, it was an exceptionally bizarre sequence. After performing a rendition of “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King, “The Gremlin” started pulling at his mask and demanding that “I want to take this off right now,” complaining, according to host Nick Cannon, that “it’s too damn hot.” And so while the judging panel loses its mind over the unscripted chaos, “The Gremlin” is helped out of his elaborate costume, revealing that it was, almost implausibly, 68-year-old star of The Wrestler Mickey Rourke underneath. In a short interview after the hullabaloo, a sweat-drenched Rourke drolly explained to Cannon why, tantrum notwithstanding, he did the show in the first place. “I was in the neighborhood,” he said. “I do like the show. I watched like four episodes when they asked me, ‘Would you be interested?’ So I watched, like, from the very beginning and all that shit.” And that’s it. He cut ties with the show immediately after and eschewed all of the typically extensive post-unmasking press responsibilities. And you know what? I get it. Is there a more accurate channeling of the fuck-this-shit vibes of today than a cantankerous celeb begrudgingly taking part of the dog-and-pony show of what mainstream America has misguidedly ruled as “good,” realizing how truly terrible the experience is, and then being like “it’s too hot, screw this” and walking off in anarchy, expectations be damned? Was Mickey Rourke on The Masked Singer actually a searing piece of topical performance art? Or is the most telling thing about it how America has gone beyond the capacity for such metaphor? I guess the point is that I never want to watch this show again/stay tuned for my take on whatever happens next week. A Christmas Miracle, If We Make It to Christmas A Christmas musical produced by and starring Dolly Parton is [coming to Netflix]( this November with Christine Baranski, Jenifer Lewis, and former So You Think You Can Dance legend Jeanine Mason also starring and Debbie Allen directing. [Alternate text]( The plot of the film is not, believe or not, “Kevin Fallon had a dream once and now it’s come true and he’s going to cry for 90 minutes about how beautiful it is and it turns out that the universe is actually good, God is real, and she’s got Dolly Parton’s epic tits.” Evidently it is an It’s a Wonderful Life-inspired story in which a domineering rich lady played by Baranski (Pulitzer Prize for casting) returns to her quaint hometown to evict all the charming people who live there and develop a mall on the land. And right before Christmas, too! Would you believe that the warm spirit of the townspeople, and the guiding voice of an actual angel (Dolly Parton, duh) changes her mind? Anyway, the only reason to want to live past Election Day hits Netflix Nov. 22. The Tiger King. Err...I Mean Lion King. Earlier this week, as inevitable as if it was written in the ancient scrolls, Carole Baskin performed a samba on Dancing With the Stars to “Circle of Life” from The Lion King while dressed as an actual lion. It ranks among the most lunatic things I’ve seen on that show—that’s a high bar—and the notorious Tiger King star was eliminated. [Alternate text] Not hours later, [Variety reported]( that Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) will direct a sequel to The Lion King, a follow-up to the uncanny valley “live-action” remake of the Disney cartoon that made a few trillion dollars last year. Coincidence? Cross-promotion? Carole Baskin’s Nala audition? Violent attempt at murdering my last two remaining brain cells? Who could say. The Best Thing on the Internet This Week [Alternate text] Sex and the City, [with more pussy](. [Alternate text] - Dick Johnson Is Dead: The best movie of the year. (Friday on Netflix) - One Day at a Time: The new season on CBS for you to watch! (Monday on CBS) - Schitt’s Creek: The season now on Netflix for you to watch! (Wednesday on Netflix) - The Good Lord Bird: Ethan Hawke maniacally screaming is always a good thing. (Sunday on Showtime) - Saturday Night Live: Live, in-studio, with an audience! Also Jim Carrey as Biden! (Saturday on NBC) [Alternate text] - The Walking Dead: The World Beyond: A show’s title should never be a metaphor for its quality. (Sunday on AMC) Advertisement [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( © Copyright 2020 The Daily Beast Company LLC 555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011 [Privacy Policy]( If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, [click here]( to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, or think you have received this message in error, you can [safely unsubscribe](.