‘The Big “Nailed It!” Baking Challenge’ Review: Cakes and Chaos

As the story goes, a friend’s mom, a refugee from World War II-era Belgium, was being introduced to “The Music Man” during a television broadcast. “This is why I came to America,” she said, watching librarians dance on desktops. “Nowhere else would they make something like this.”

Nowhere else would they make “Nailed It!” either. It is hardly a classic of the Broadway stage; it isn’t even a classic among baking shows. But it has already been on TV in various iterations for seven seasons. Which itself is phenomenal: It is a one-joke comedy, the joke being about contestants who crash and burn, sometimes literally, in their efforts to re-create various elaborately decorated cakes. The more catastrophic the results, the better. At least for purposes of the facetiously titled “Nailed It!”

There is, most assuredly, an element of schadenfreude in watching hapless bakers turn perfectly innocent ingredients into a crime scene. Yet, the show seems to generate less mockery on the part of a viewer than camaraderie. Who hasn’t had a kitchen disaster, after all? And there is also something reassuringly American about “Nailed It!”: Perhaps only in a country so comfortable in its own mythology, so accustomed to success and so confident about second chances would a show that celebrates failure be such a winner.

That would be “winner,” rest assured, in an exclusively commercial sense: The “Nailed It!” formula is about low-end production values, spasmodic editing, and comedy writing that didn’t need a strike to go on strike. Those qualities seem to be timeless on reality television, but the premise of the show is not something that can, like sourdough starter, be used in perpetuity. And the producers know it. Which is why we now have “The Big ‘Nailed It!’ Baking Challenge,” which violates a central tenet in what might be overstated as the franchise’s governing principle: The bakers are going to learn something.

Correction: They are going to be told something. Whether they absorb it is another question. Judging from the first few installments of this 10-episode season, they will not.

What hasn’t changed is the host, the ebullient Nicole Byer, or her on-screen partner, world-acclaimed chocolatier Jacques Torres. His smiling presence continues to be a mystery, though he has contributed what little practical and professional advice the contestants have ever heard. Until now: Providing actual instruction are Erin Jeanne McDowell, pastry chef and cookbook author, and cake artist Robert Lucas, both of whom teach the 10 contestants enough rudimentary skills in making and icing a multi-tiered cake that they should have been able to keep matters from toppling over. “Should have” might have been the show’s motto.

The players in the previous incarnations of “Nailed It!” and in the big-baking-challenge format seem to have been chosen for their personalities and their senses of humor, which are never more entertaining than Ms. Byer’s but make them pitifully charming as they stumble through this recipe or that. I, for one, have never paid much attention to “Nailed It!” because it never seemed to have anywhere to go, and it doesn’t seem to have much more of a destination now: Bakers make a hash of things, someone laughs, they move on to another gluten-based disaster. If someone were to create a flawless, multiple-storied, butter-creamed confection it would be a miracle. But the baker would be gone from this show in a congested heartbeat.

—Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.