Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Crime Scene Kitchen’ On Fox, A Baking Competition Where Contestants Gather Evidence To See What Was Baked

We don’t know what the creators of Crime Scene Kitchen were smoking when they came up with this baking competition, but we suspect it was some pretty damn good stuff. Basically, teams of bakers need to recreate a dish from the evidence they see in the title kitchen, left behind after said dish was made. Seems pretty weird, right? Who better to host a weird reality show than Joel McHale? Read on for more.

CRIME SCENE KITCHEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Host Joel McHale walks onto a flashy set and says, “What you see over there is a crime scene.”

The Gist: The “crime scene” in question is a model of a kitchen, where evidence has been left of what was baked in it. Crime Scene Kitchen is a baking competition where six teams of two will each go into that kitchen and, from the clues, the teams have two hours to replicate what was baked in that kitchen as closely as possible.

Judging the resulting baked goods are the people who created those recipes in that kitchen: Yolanda Gampp, who has a popular YouTube baking program, and chef Curtis Stone. Curtis Stone… baking, you ask? Yes, we asked that too, but there he is, in all his Aussie glory. The idea is that the teams are judged based on whether they guessed the dish correctly, and then how well they made what they made.

Guessing correctly tends to make you safe, unless everyone guesses correctly. Winning the first of the two rounds (the “Dessert Round”) will give your team an extra clue in the “Showpiece Round”. The team that comes in last in the Showpiece Round gets eliminated. The ultimate prize is $100,000.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Crime Scene Kitchen is essentially The Great British Baking Show with the volume turned up to 13.

Our Take: You would think that the gimmick of having pastry chefs — some with shops, some who are more home bakers — guess what to bake from evidence left behind would get old quickly, but somehow Crime Scene Kitchen makes its gimmick work. Perhaps it’s because it doesn’t even try to take itself seriously, or perhaps there’s a bit of a thrill in seeing these bakers, some of whom are oh so confident they made the right dish, get hoisted on their petards when the actual dish is revealed.

But, really, our enjoyment of the show came down to the fact that Joel McHale was hosting it. It’s interesting that McHale, after over a decade of making fun of reality shows like this on The Soup, is now hosting them. And what’s interesting is he brings that same droll, detached, this-is-so-silly attitude to hosting these shows. He jokes about how many minutes are left — he calls five minutes “hundreds of seconds,” for instance — and takes what some of the contestants admitted in the interviews and uses that against him. We laughed hard when he shocked the son of a mother-son team who admitted that he could be “jumpy” when pressed for time.

McHale is one of the executive producers, which is why he has the latitude he does to make fun of this generally silly show. But when it comes down to the contest itself, he takes things seriously enough to be credible, just like he does on Card Sharks. The contestants are the usual mix of “arguing friend couple,” “loud mother-daughter team”, “mother and mama’s boy”, “two buddies from Brooklyn”, etc. Producers don’t give them a ton of time to talk about their lives and careers, so you generally have to root for or against them based on their kitchen interactions. They’re all mostly entertaining, albeit generic.

You’ve seen Stone judge and cook on so many shows over the years, if you come into this show thinking he’s going to do something differently, you’ll be disappointed. Gampp gives some interesting feedback, but the first episode didn’t really reveal much about whether she’s going to be a tough judge or not.

Do we care much who wins? No. Do we care that someone thought to make a bakewell tart instead of a Boston cream pie? Not really. But the guessing game sure is fun. And it seems that the light tone throughout will help the format go down as easy as a moist carrot cake.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After the eliminees leave, McHale says six new teams (!) will compete to see who gets to go up against the original group. How the hell long is this show?

Sleeper Star: We liked Amanda and Erinn, who blew their first round so badly that they were likely on the chopping block if they didn’t nail the second round. And they admitted that they blew it.

Most Pilot-y Line: Then again, the editors of the show really leaned on every reference the two of them made to being former military. We get it, folks.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Crime Scene Kitchen is enjoyable because of Joel McHale, full stop. Everything else on the show is fungible, except for the guessing game you will have once you see the evidence left in that crime scene. Either way, it’ll make you hungry, which is always a good sign of a cooking show.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Crime Scene Kitchen On Fox