This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
I think we all remember where we were when the international incident took place.
Me? After another long, arduous week, I had nestled into the nook of my couch, turned on my TV, and prepped my body and soul for healing. I was ready for my lil’ blip of Friday night happiness—the antidote to the fever of stress that threatens to overcome without this ritual. It was time to watch the new episode of my beloved Great British Baking Show on Netflix.
But what I witnessed that night has shaken me to my core. My perception of the world as I thought I knew it has changed forever. The trust issues this global catastrophe has instilled may never be undone. Will I ever recover? Will any of us?
The first sight when the episode began was such a shock. It was almost too upsetting to believe it was real. But it was, unfortunately. On last week’s Great British Baking Show, it was “Mexico Week,” and there were hosts Matt Lucas and Noel Fielding, two white Englishmen dressed in stereotypical ponchos and sombreros. Were they making fun of Spanish-speaking accents, too? You bet your soggy bottom they were.
In the Year of Our Chalamet 2022, one of the most high-profile television programs in the U.K.—one of the biggest in the world, really—began a new episode with blatantly racist jokes that, aside from being offensive and in bad taste, have famously gotten dozens of celebrities, politicians, and public figures fired from their jobs in recent years. Worse, the series was framing an entire episode around a theme that, given the history of the show, would practically litter the baking tent with landmines to set off. And that they did.
The carnage was brutal.
On the list of offenses: the treatment of “Mexican food” as if it was a cuisine beamed down from space for humans to try for the first time. The reduction of the culture to “bright colors” and “things that have corn in it.” The pronunciations of “guacamole” and “pico de gallo,” which are too graphic to detail here (our chief GBBS correspondent Fletcher Peters, a war reporter if there ever was one, has done the brave work of detailing the sheer violence of it all).
And forget the cringe-worthy nature of the episode for a second: Why were they making tacos on a baking show?!
It was one of the worst hours of television I’ve seen in a long time. I hated every second of it. And I can’t wait to tune into this week’s new episode once I’m wrapped with work on Friday.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we stay loyal to shows long after they start to actively make us angry—let alone when they are objectively bad? There are more shows on TV right now than one could feasibly watch over their entire lifetime, yet we remain dedicated to being furious about the garbage we won’t just throw out.
I think about this a lot, although this GBBS travesty has brought it into sharp focus.
I’ve been aggravated by this show, one that used to be the very best thing that television had to offer, for years. Lucas and Fielding’s bits are unwatchable and antithetical to the original spirit of the series. Challenges have veered aggressively toward Pinterest-ready showstoppers and away from the heartwarming test of how well a self-taught home baker can create these classic things. Eliminations started making no sense; at one point, there were conspiracy theories that producers wanted to keep young, attractive contestants longer. And the producers seem to have lost the plot completely. This is a show about baking. Pray tell: Why are we making pizzas and tacos?
Apparently, this week’s new episode will feature a cruelly difficult technical challenge. I will likely throw a conniption while watching. But make no mistake—what is wrong with me?—I will be watching.
I think a lot of us can relate to this. When a new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race is on, for example, episode drops are an event. If I’m not with friends while watching it, we’re texting about it together and absolutely tweeting about it with other fans. The general content of these messages: What in the living hell is going on with this godforsaken show?!
Few fan bases are as devoted to and angered by the series they love than Drag Race fans. Each new season runs as if producers have shredded the rule books from 15 different games, then pieced them back together randomly to establish the new cycle’s overly complicated, incredibly irritating format. Producer intervention each week is so blatant, they should just have producers narrate at this point. And yet, we will never stop watching.
This is a case where, when it’s good, it’s really good, as in the recent All-Stars season. But, oh, the suffering to get to that point.
There’s a similar shared vibe with fans of the Real Housewives franchise, who turn watching each respective series into a weekly venting session of which cast member is the most hateable and unwatchable. And we will all convene this weekend at BravoCon (I’ll be moderating! Come see me!) to ecstatically celebrate these people we apparently loathe.
It’s almost a pathology, and it’s not limited to reality TV.
There are times while watching Apple TV+’s The Morning Show when I reflexively lept from my couch and began pacing my apartment because I was so disgusted by how ludicrous a plot twist was.
I hear that people still watch The Handmaid’s Tale, an act of self-masochism if I’ve ever heard of one.
And let’s not forget when we were all compulsively watching And Just Like That…: The Sex and the City sequel was a rare unifying event in our culture, where everyone held hands and wailed in unison, “WHAT DID THEY DO TO MY CHERISHED MIRANDA HOBBS?!” Then we’d all clear our calendars to make sure we watched the next episode as soon as it was released.
My friend Louis Peitzman recently posted a prompt on Twitter that was a variation of this, asking, “What’s the worst TV show that you watch?” Not a guilty pleasure series, he specified, but a genuinely terrible show. He received hundreds of responses, naming shows as varied as The Walking Dead and Sister Wives.
I’ll never understand it, yet I am just like them. Haven’t we learned that life is too short? Don’t I, of all people, know that there is so much great content to be watching instead?
In any case, I’ll see you all on Wednesday night when the new American Horror Story season premieres. We learn nothing.
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