You’ve probably seen the trending show Is It Cake? on your Netflix account and thought “what?” and you’d be fair in that assessment. It’s how I started the show. I thought “This can’t possibly be any good” and then binged the entire thing in the span of a day and I don’t regret it.
The Netflix series asks us the most pressing of questions: Is it cake? Let us explain. One of the more … shall we say, interesting things to come out of the pandemic was a sudden obsession with making things look so close to reality that you cannot tell if they are cake or the actual object. Or at least broadcasting these fanciful, mind-bending cakes on social media for our general amazement and consumption. Why? Because it’s fun.
So Netflix then decided to make a reality show out of it called Is It Cake? and the show is pretty much what you’d expect! A group of bakers are tasked with first picking which of a series of objects is a cake and whoever succeeds the fastest gets to then pick the cake that they want to make.
Sounds easy, right? Well, it’s not and the show keeps you on the edge of your seat while having Saturday Night Live‘s Mikey Day host. Day, who knows absolutely nothing about baking, messes with contestants and they tease him back and it makes for an easy show to binge-watch.
The cakes are truly works of art and while the show tries to hide which object is actually cake, we sometimes know whose cake it is. Because if there is only one blue birthday hat and we watched Jonny putting pom poms on a blue hat, it’s kind of easy to know which one is the cake in that moment. Still, we can play along.
A fun take on a cooking competition
What makes Is It Cake? stick out is that it doesn’t feel like a competition where those involved want to tear each other down. Everyone just seems to genuinely be having fun trying to figure out what is the best way to hide their cakes. Sure, it’s an internet meme turned into a reality show on Netflix but it doesn’t feel cheap in the way it could so easily be. Instead, it’s escapist fun when we need it most.
And it has been a delightful time on Twitter where we all have become cake experts in the best possible way.
Or suddenly we’re all the keepers of the rules.
When you stop and think about it, this is simply just a show about whether or not something is cake or a toy elephant. This is the state of our society and the nature of much of what’s streaming to catch our wandering attention. But watching someone like actor Bobby Moynihan completely scream over what’s actually a cake or fight with the other judges trying to figure it out in 30 seconds is truly peak 2022 television. We’ve arrived, folks.
At this point in the pandemic, everyone deserves to have Jonny Manganello (or Jonny Hats) in their lives.
You can literally put on Is It Cake? in one afternoon and finish the entire thing and why not? If you have the time, watch a group of bakers having fun and trying to be there for one another while also lying to Mikey Day and telling him that cakes have something called a “tiltscape”.
(image: Netflix)
