I don’t know much about baking. I have made cookies before, and they turned out to be better than you might expect, but I also once managed to misread a bread recipe, adding far too much yeast and creating a horrifying bread monster that kept growing and growing like a movie monster from the 1950s.
I do know enough that when watching Nailed It, which has two seasons on Netflix, I am able to understand the horror that is unfolding before me. The show helps, as it has very informative and interesting baking tips to explain why using the wrong sugar will make your cake crumble, for example. The show is all about making the audience and its contestants into better bakers, through learning what not to do.
The premise is simple, take a bunch of home bakers who are enthusiastic, if not necessarily skilled, and ask that they create the kind of cake dessert that would get a special all on its own on a different program. That they often can’t get too close isn’t a surprise, but that’s not the point. Instead, we are here for their mistakes, so we can learn from them. Also, somehow, a disastrous attempt at baking is inherently funny, see also the internet sensation Cake Wrecks.
Contestants are here to win a prize - either a piece of kitchen equipment or $10,000, depending on the challenge – but they’re more here to learn a bit themselves. They are aware of their failings, and if they have to be on TV to learn the correct way to combine dry ingredients, so be it.
Hosts Nicole Byers and Jacques Torres are very good at keeping the tone light and fun, while Torres, a French chocolatier, takes every opportunity to make the most complicated cake design seem simpler, or at least attainable by mere mortals. Between them, and a rotating guest judge, it kind of lessens the blow when a baker realizes, far too late, that they confused salt and sugar. Everyone’s here to have fun, and they don’t expect perfection.
Nailed it is, ultimately, quite silly, but it’s purposefully silly, and I imagine there are a few people out there who have done a better job in the kitchen after seeing the comedy on their screens.
