In the preface to Tom Nichols’ book “The Death of Expertise,” he describes the worrisome American trend of dismissing experts as irrelevant (patients who haughtily quote Dr. Google to their own specialists, to use one irritating example) as a symptom of a collective “narcissism, coupled with a disdain for expertise as some sort of exercise in self-actualization.”
More and more, many Americans aren’t just skeptical of “established knowledge,” Nichols claims, they’re hostile to the very idea. Nichols is tracing a cultural self-indulgence that has helped bankrupt our public discourse, corrupt public policy and derail public safety, and in some ways has led to the ascendance of Donald Trump as the ne plus ultra of political “I could do that”-ism, with little or no connection to the pastry arts. But if you watch enough hours of competitive baking TV — guilty as charged! — you start to see the connection.
Do you make things? Do they turn out reasonably well? If so, and if you’re an American, someone — a relative, a friend, a stranger — has likely encouraged you to go pro with your passion, to hang out a shingle and enter the marketplace. Otherwise, how can your endeavor — and, by extension, you — know its true value? If you demur, expect to be met with bewilderment or even scorn. What could be the point of all that time and effort spent learning how to do a thing well if you’re just going to give it away?
Baking requires precision, science and patience in addition to artistic flair, and rewards repeat efforts with incremental gains in proficiency. Earlier waves of presentation-fetish media — pre-stoner Martha Stewart being the poster child — honored this. On the darker side, it also ushered in a period ruled by the quiet tyranny of perfection, especially for middle-class women who were expected to pursue a rewarding career while attachment-parenting and also making a cozy and/or whimsical home and hearth.
Later, corporate downsizing and the gig economy led to the rise of the monetized side hustle, where those skills could be assigned a market value by necessity. It was only a matter of time before we consumed the grind of running a small business as rendered into spectator bloodsport secondhand, on shows like Food Network's “Cupcake Wars,” where bakery owners compete in a series of artificial challenges to win cash prizes and As-seen-on-TV notoriety.
It might sound like I’m arguing that our collective esteem for crafts expertise has risen as the stock in intellectual labor has tumbled. There's no “America’s Next Top Climate Scientist,” right? But just as anyone with Google these days believes they can become a self-styled expert on highly technical subjects like immunology, many of us armed with nothing but Pinterest inspiration accounts have allowed ourselves to believe we can become a whiz overnight at executing elaborate and fancifully decorated confections. Traditional hurdles like apprenticing for years under a master — whether at work, school or home — be damned! What’s more, many of us have come to believe that we should do that. Inside each American, we secretly suspect, is a prodigy just waiting to emerge, and then maybe nab a lucrative endorsement deal.
At the root of both rejections of the slog required to become an actual expert in something is entitlement, which is as American as an over-iced cupcake.
We didn’t get there on our own. As author Allen Salkin told Salon about “The Worst Cooks in America,” in which the hopeless enter a culinary boot-camp elimination showdown, it “fits into almost a two-decade tradition at Food Network of an underlying theme that anybody should be able to cook.” That was the democratic aim of classics like “The Barefoot Contessa” and “Good Eats,” but over the last decade, the network’s programming has also shifted noticeably toward competition. Watch enough of Food Network's pressure-cooker game shows and it’s hard to resist armchair-quarterbacking with the confidence of a Cordon Bleu grad — an arrogance I would never have considered levying at Ina Garten. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that fans have been consuming the idea that anybody should be able to win — even dominate — at cooking, too.
As Nichols told Salon in an interview last year, there's been a change in how we learn, and there's a lifestyles television connection:
I didn’t coin this, and I wish I had. One of my friends calls it the "HGTV Effect." Where you’re living in Ohio in maybe a one-floor or two-bedroom, three-bedroom, one-bath, 1950s kind of house, and you’re watching your 40-inch television and you’re saying, "How come I don’t have granite counter tops? Those mooks do. These are just working people on some TV show, and they’ve got a brand new granite and steel kitchen. I’m deprived, I’m poor." It’s amazing to me what people now consider deprived.
The commodification of knowledge has vulgarized our taste in knowledge, the same way that the fast food revolution vulgarized our taste in food. We’ve become childlike in our expectations of how we learn things. I think back to political campaigns that I started following as a child before I could vote. There were vastly more complicated discussions and debates then.
A rejection of those childlike expectations leads some fans to prefer the gentle-TV competition of “The Great British Bake Off” (styled as “The Great British Baking Show” for stateside PBS viewers), where tradition and excellence are celebrated, the contestants are proficient and creative home bakers, and the calmest and steadiest among them often end up taking home the top prize, which is a lovely etched cake-plate trophy.
Attempts to replicate that show's success on this side of the pond have fallen somewhat short for good reason. Practice for the sake of practice — which is what's required, for years, before you can even think about auditioning for a show like this — in which the mastery itself is an end and reward, is simply not an American value. Where’s the fast cash in that? When Americans show passion and proficiency in the pastry arts, chances are they've started sorting themselves out of the amateur category and into the “Cupcake Wars” pipeline already.
As it turns out, the American answer to “Great British Bake Off” does exist, and it’s not the lackluster “Great American Baking Show.” (Season 3 was shelved in December, anyway, after judge Johnny Iuzzini was accused of sexual misconduct.) It’s a send-up of baking competition shows, “Nailed It!,” which debuted on Netflix with a six-episode season earlier this month.
“Nailed It!” is built upon a popular self-deprecating meme, in which you compare the image of an elaborately and perfectly sculpted dessert sourced from Pinterest against your own miserable failed attempt. The sarcastic “Nailed It!” caption is an ironic badge of honor: cue the earnest narrator voice-over intoning, “She did not, in fact, nail it.”
“Nailed It!” is the Food Network satire hate-watchers (not to mention fans of the venerable "Cake Wrecks" blog) have been waiting for. While the network’s interminable dessert-skirmish shows were lampooned beautifully in Season 2 of “Master of None,” there’s nothing quite as effective as mocking an institution from within its own form. But alongside the jabs at the competition show format, “Nailed It!” offers a subtle commentary on the sense of unearned bravado that leads Americans to believe that after one online tutorial, any one of us could hold our own against a trained pro — in the kitchen, the Oval Office, wherever.
The format is familiar: Three contestants compete in two rounds of timed challenges, re-creating at their individual kitchen stations some professionally executed concoction. They're judged, with the winner of Round 1 taking home a smaller prize. The grand winner gets showered with $10,000, shot out of a money gun. For real.
The contestants are wildly inexperienced and not oblivious to this fact, yet they remain sunnily confident they can put on a good show. The host, comedian Nicole Byer, and judges (pastry chef Jacques Torres anchors a rotating cast of bemused pros) are incredulous at their results, sometimes doubling over and wheezing with laughter. But miracle of miracles: Nobody breaks down in tears over failures. Winners are determined by, basically, "Who did it less worse?"
This is not a mean-spirited show, however. The judges, despite their laughter, are appropriately kind. They find something to praise in every disaster, yet they never oversell a modest achievement. “You put a cake together,” says Chef Jacques with a reassuring shrug, “so you know, for that, congratulations.” “Thank you,” the contestant murmurs with quiet pride.
Compared to the tradition-bound, genteel challenges the Brits hand down in their storied tent, on this garish cardboard set the model baked goods are, frankly, grotesque — airbrushed and fondant-sculpted 3-D monstrosities that, even when perfectly executed, are of questionable aesthetic taste. There is a doughnut made to look like a pirate, or a “volcano cake” that resembles a production design model for a “Jurassic Park” sequel, complete with edible waterfalls, magma, dinosaurs and, for the coup de grâce, a science fair-style gaseous eruption. It’s all too ridiculous for words, and the contestants, who make rookie mistakes like forgetting to add flour to their cake batter and mistaking powdered sugar for granulated — so forget about, say, making a fondant face that's going to look like a princess, not E.T. — howl in disbelief when each task is unveiled.
The seams on this program show, giving a deliberate, meta middle-finger to the genre: Look how cheap and tacky we are, the slipshod attitude announces, isn’t it a riot? In one episode, a guest judge blithely wanders off for half the episode to address a child care situation: Was that a poke at the scripted "drama" of these shows, or did he simply assume it would be edited out in post-production? Either way, it's hilarious. After a decade of watching the serious simulations of this bizarre environment, the self-awareness on "Nailed It!" — all of it — is incredibly cathartic.
In a sublime act of manifesting the metaphor, the final challenge of the season calls for the contestants to construct an edible cake bust of Donald Trump. The results predictably fall short of the ideal, with one memorable entry looking more like "Simpsons" villain Mr. Burns, or a golden Gollum, which maybe nails it on a whole other level. The episode even shows Byer recording two challenge introductions — one for if Trump is still president at airtime and one for the alternative. “Bring me the head of Trump!” she crows when time is declared up.
So many food reality competitions gin up the drama to make the act of watching someone throw things around a kitchen more entertaining. "Nailed It!" might have a ticking clock and suspenseful music and gimmicks to help or hinder the contestants, but it's oddly free of situational drama. We already know the results are going to be bad — the only question is, bad to what degree? It's a remarkably freeing sensation to care so little for the outcome because the artificiality and absurdity of the whole enterprise has been laid utterly bare. The genius of the show is that it manages to avoid making that feel cynical. Everyone's having too much fun painting lumpy cookies with their own self-portraits to care.
What "Nailed It!" offers — aside from in-jokes for Food Network hate-watchers and Pinterest failers — is a lesson in just how difficult it is to master anything worth learning how to do right, no matter how easy the internet makes it look. Watching it is an exercise in feeling the enormity of all you don’t know, and being OK with that for once. It's also a joyful celebration of failing with grace. In a winner-take-all culture where our president regularly taunts his political foes with nasty "loser!" language, that's a skill we don't practice or value enough. On "Nailed It!" it's never humiliating to so not nail it, or to admit to not knowing things, or to defer to superior knowledge.
Best of all, nothing about this show will make you feel pressured into re-creating any of the desserts at home yourself. Go ahead and bring a simple pan of brownies to the party if you like. Delete your Pinterest account, finally. If you need a birthday cake shaped like a shark eating a surfer whole — why? is a question you should ask yourself first — call a bakery. An expert is standing by to take your order.
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