BRAD MICHELSON
The Martlet (University of Victoria)

VICTORIA (CUP) — Screw these cake shows. I can appreciate cooking shows and I love the Food Channel, but I cannot understand the fascination with cakes.

There is an art and an aesthetic quality to food, even if it’s something off of the grungy Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Food varies from sour to savoury, from warm to cold. Cake is just cake; it’s sweet, usually served at room temperature and covered in fondant.

There are exceptions, but no one likes flambé, and ice cream cake screams Grade 3 birthday party. TLC’s The Cake Boss and Food Network’s Ace of Cakes have made a spectacle out of nothing, and, for some reason that completely eludes me, people are eating it up — pun intended, folks.

What makes this whole gateau-fully sinful situation worse is that Food Network and TLC took these shows to the next level by making competitive versions of them.

The creation and consequent pop-culture explosion of Survivor at the beginning of the new millennium acted as the metaphorical big bang for reality TV’s evolution. Scripted television wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy our culture’s entertainment bloodlust. We needed real people in made-to-look-real situations doing really crazy shit for our viewing pleasure.

Flash forward a decade: We’ve got less-than-amazing people racing around the world and some guy named Bear Grylls biting the heads of snakes and drinking yak’s blood from a severed jugular.

What has television come to?

For TLC, it’s come to The Next Great Baker, the network’s latest answer to reality TV — as if I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant and 19 Kids and Counting weren’t enough. The winner is promised $50,000, a 2011 Chevy Cruze and a job at Carlo’s Bake Shop in Hoboken, New Jersey.

While that’s all fine and dandy, we should remember how it ended for past winners of Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen, the show The Next Great Baker rips off. And I’m not talking about the one who lost her prize because she couldn’t obtain a work visa to work at Gordon Ramsay’s Savoy Grill in London. I’m talking about the real winners.

Although every Hell’s Kitchen winner — there have been eight winners produced so far by the American version — is promised a cushy head chef job at whatever overpriced Ramsay-owned restaurant chosen, they end up with a less glamorous position. Likewise, for all we know, the winner of The Next Great Baker could end up as the employee who has to taste the sugar to see if they confused it with the salt.

Basically, once cake shows stepped out of the “docu-soap” reality realm and entered the competition zone, a line was crossed. No cleverly edited television show can ever prove to me that the life of a baker is more exciting than my own.

Just look at Ace of Cakes. That Geoff guy is one of the least exciting TV personalities I’ve ever seen. The only reason the show is mildly entertaining to some is because head baker and owner of Charm City Cakes, Duff Goldman. I should say was mildly entertaining: Ace of Cakes was just cancelled.

More of these cake shows need to end. I drew my line at the fact they even existed in the realm of reality TV. The second the competition spin-off was conceived, that line was crossed, war was declared, and I decided to change the channel. You should do the same.

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