The Great British Baking Show Needs a Villain

Yes, it goes against everything this show stands for. But hear me out.

This season of The Great British Baking Show has been a bit like a set custard: The ingredients are simpler, the end result seemingly smooth. Cut into it, though, and you’ll find something that feels a little congealed, a little stuck in its ways. GBBS’s decision to go back to basics has made for a fairly pleasant viewing experience, where the contestants aren’t being tortured by the whims of judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith. But it’s also been — aside from Alison Hammond and Noel Fielding’s ability to simultaneously flirt with each other and every competitor — somewhat boring, and a reflection of the entertainment limits of GBBS’s hands-off editing approach. So let me make a suggestion to cut through GBBS’s gelatinous kindness: It’s time for this show to embrace the villain edit!

Is this antithetical to everything GBBS claims to be about? Sure! Thirteen years and 14 seasons in, GBBS has remained ever-committed to the veneer of judging fairness and the projection of cast collaboration, both of which are buoyed by the lack of a cash prize. The series has never deviated from the structure of its challenges: For the signature and showstopper, the competitors are allowed to design and practice their offerings in advance; for the technical, everyone gets the same ingredients and the same set of instructions, and the judges evaluate their bakes without knowing who made what. All of that preparation, GBBS says, is to even the stakes, so that the bakers are only considered by the episode-to-episode quality of their bakes. But as Paul and Prue kept amping up their demands and assigning more and more rigorous undertakings, that promise began to feel as hollow as properly prepared choux, so this season left behind the biscuit chandeliers, edible sculptures, and consistently offensive nation-themed recipes for a more even-keeled tone.

From a success standpoint, that’s been good for the bakers this season. Meltdowns, literal and figurative, have been rare as challenges were confined to specific one-offs (one kind of marshmallow biscuit, one variation of a sausage roll), with good chunks of time afforded them to assemble bigger asks like an edible chocolate box or spherical meringue bombe. Yes, the technicals have been intermittently unfair, like the too-short times given to prove Devonshire Splits or figure out treacle puddings; Paul and Prue are seemingly incapable of entirely letting go of their culinary cruelty. Outside of that challenge, though, clear disaster for the bakers has been the result of overestimating their own skills or getting too ambitious — like Dan’s raw-dough “pizza” letters or Tasha’s butter-on-the-outside laminated pastry — not because the task itself was too ludicrous. The unexpected impact of this dialing back of difficulty, however, is that the things about GBBS which haven’t changed are more clear, and have resulted in a sense of slightly stale monotony. Simpler challenges are better for the bakers, but they’re not boosting the series’s entertainment value enough to make up for its other wearied qualities.

It’s well established by this point that GBBS contestants are primarily charming people who want to do their best; they’ve also become archetypes, and their arcs are all a bit familiar. Consider this season’s finalists: Josh is the science-minded young man whose only humanities indulgence is baking (like season seven’s aerospace engineer, Andrew; season nine’s nuclear engineer, Rahul; and season 13’s electronics engineer, Abdul). Dan is the increasingly experimental-with-flavors middle-aged husband and dad (season five’s builder, Richard; season nine’s blood courier, Jon; and season 11’s rock climber and sculptor, Marc). And Matty is the good-natured cutie with unexpectedly solid instincts (season seven’s banker, Selasi; season eight’s student, Liam; and season 12’s sales manager, Chigs). GBBS has cast the same sorts of people over and over again, and while the storylines they provide about using baking to break out of their comfort zones or connect with their families are sweet, they also add to the series’s feeling of entrenchment. GBBS needs more meaningful internal friction, and a villain edit would provide it.

This isn’t to diminish how a lot of these competitors do seem to genuinely care about each other, and are willing to lend a hand when someone needs help finishing in time or whenever Rahul needed to be told, once more, that he really was good, actually. But the villain edit could be used as a tool to address both the series’s increasing predictability in how it casts its ensemble, and how each season is shaped by who Paul and Prue determine to be their early favorites, and whose flaws or missteps they overlook. This isn’t a request for GBBS to change these people into the Joker; it’s an appeal to allow them the opportunity to express themselves in a way that creates the series’s currently missing tension. Maybe we could get Dan and Matty’s thoughts on Josh’s overachieving approach, or Matty and Josh’s opinions on Dan sticking around after that generous “pizza” save, or Dan and Josh’s reactions to Matty’s tendency to peek around at his competitors when he’s at a loss for what’s next during a technical.

It’s not like GBBS’s version of the villain edit needs to be something out of Real Housewives, The Traitors, House of Villains, or any of the many other reality-TV programs that make entertainment out of backstabbing, lying, and fighting. On GBBS, a more-involved editing touch could simply mean additional cutaway interviews where contestants share more about what they view as their difficulties and who they view as their competition, and more frankness about how they react to Paul and Prue’s judging. Do they really think it’s fair that when one of them goes home sick, they get a pass for those challenges, while two people usually go home the following week? How do the competitors react to Paul and Prue’s tendency to judge people on what their potential is, rather than what they actually present? Is there bitterness between the contestants when they end up doing similar flavors, or when contestants spy over each others’ shoulders? The villain edit could convey how certain bakers come into the tent with more knowledge than others, greater finesse in manipulating the judges, or more blatant self-congratulation; it could help us understand why certain competitors whose work is described as resembling wallpaper or being an utter failure in pastry would get to stick around while others go home. (I clearly still have some issues to work through with how long Sandro and Janusz stayed on in season 13.)

And, look, sometimes the villain edit is just fun to watch — not necessarily a way to flatten someone but as a way to round them out, to give as much attention to their “bad” thoughts and opinions as their “good” ones. To whatever extent GBBS might adopt elements of the villain edit, it would mean a vision of the tent that, more than a decade into this series, reflects the multifaceted nature of its contestants and the manufactured pressures they’re under in a more coherent, even genuine, way. It might seem contradictory, but a more hands-on edit that shows the contestants at their most honest — and perhaps most vexed, distressed, and irritated at the judges and at each other — would at least provide an authenticity that GBBS’s rigidly kind format increasingly lacks. That series might not be as nice, but it would be more engaging.