The Big Nailed It Baking Challenge Review 2023 Tv Show Series Season Cast Crew Online

We all know the drill: a dozen contestants proficient in a skill or profession enter a competition and are eliminated one by one until a major payday and accompanying career boost are bestowed upon a lone winner. It’s a format as old as Tyra, one we’ve seen on dozens of reality competition shows from America’s Next Top Model and Top Chef to RuPaul’s Drag Race and The Great British Baking Show. It’s a format that stays the same whether it’s applied to fashion (Project Runway), crafting (Making It), or even tattooing (Ink Master). Leave it to Nailed It! to completely upend the formula in a way that only Nailed It! could.

Netflix’s chaotic beginners’ baking show has always been more of an episodic game show, with a trio of contestants getting one episode to either win big or go home. The Big Nailed It Baking Challenge eschews the format we’ve watched for 56 episodes and switches thing up by giving us a season-long competition show storyline that’s, in true Nailed It! fashion, unlike any we’ve ever seen before. As far as I know, this is the first reality competition show that starts with a cast of 10 sub-amateur contestants and teaches them how to do the thing during the competition. The resulting season of TV is unlike anything I’ve seen before — and I’ve watched a lot of these kinds of shows.

The season starts with the kind of bakers that you normally see on Nailed It!: well-intentioned parents, aspiring bakery owners, kitchen hobbyists, etc. Heck, a few of them have actually been on Nailed It! before. These aren’t professionals by any stretch of the imagination, and their bakes in Episode 1 turn out as well as the cakes normally do on Nailed It! But instead of going home, all of them (except for one) stick around and are able to carry what they learned in Episode 1 to Episode 2. In each episode, the bakers are taught a specific skill by a couple of pros (Erin Jeanne McDowell and Robert Lucas), allowing them to level up with new tricks of the trade every week. By the time they reach the end of the season, the top two finalists… are actually bakers. It is, to quote Emmy-nominated host Nicole Byer, “wild.”

While I don’t think that original formula Nailed It! should be replicated with other skills (Nailed It!’s dalliance with crafting is proof enough of this), I do think the Big Nailed It Baking Challenge has some ingredients that could easily be shared with other shows. One episode where amateur crafters burn their fingers with hot glue? Boring! Watching them learn to wield hot glue without getting injured? Captivating! I really think this new format is worth a try — as long as the show isn’t about tattooing.

For example, instead of another Drag Race-adjacent show where queens give makeovers to straights or celebrities, why not pick 10 baby queens from all across America and let them get weekly lessons on makeup, hairstyling, sewing, dancing, acting, etc. from some Drag Race superstars? That’s a format I’d like to see instead of watching a gaggle of professionals working to transform AJ McLean from Backstreet Boy to dancing diva like they were the Peanuts gang working holiday magic on Charlie Brown’s twig tree.

There really is something intensely satisfying watching people get better and better at something they’re passionate about, and that doesn’t always happen on these shows. Usually you’re watching someone go from I-already-making-a-living-off-of-this good to now-I’ve-won-a-lot-of-money great. The Big Nailed It Baking Challenge is a season-long celebration of the idea that practice makes perfect. Well, not perfect perfect. Nailed It! perfect — and that’s a kind of perfect that we can all realistically aspire to.