‘The Great British Bake Off’ Is Reportedly ‘Scaling Back’ After Poor Response to Season 13
The Great British Bake Off is gearing up for its 14th season. The beloved British baking show drew criticism for some of the challenges of the previous season as well as the seemingly heightened difficulty. To help bring the show back to basics, they’ll reportedly be “scaling back” the production.
‘The Great British Bake Off’ had a rough season 13
Season 13 of The Great British Bake Off (referred to as The Great British Baking Show in the US) aired in 2022. Many of the challenges on the season were found by fans to be overly complicated, and the judging of the contestants’ work was perceived as harsh. There was also a notable backlash over a Mexican-themed episode as it was deemed culturally insensitive, with faux pas including hosts Matt Lucas and Noel Fielding wearing sombreros.
The Great British Baking Show executive producer Richard McKerrow shared his thoughts on the last season in a February 2023 interview on The Media Podcast. He confessed that they could have, and will, do better.
“I’d be the first to hold up our hands and say that I feel that the last series was not our strongest,” McKerrow said, according to Deadline. “You’ve got to take a look at it and go, ‘S***, [are] the challenges too complicated?’”
When it comes to the show’s upcoming fourteenth season, the team behind the show is making sure there are no faux pas this time around. “We’re looking very, very, very hard at making sure that it’s as good a series as it can be,” McKerrow said.
‘The Great British Bake Off’ is going in a new direction for season 14
In February 2023, Mirror reported on what some of the changes for the upcoming fourteenth season will be. While the show has grown more ambitious with its challenges and time constraints in recent years, all that will be done away with in the forthcoming season. Instead, the show will look a lot like the charming baking show that viewers first fell in love with over a decade ago.
“There is a realization last year’s show didn’t really work,” an insider told the British publication. “We’re going to strip it back to basics, with a few twists.”
Paul Hollywood’s thoughts on the series changes
Judge Paul Hollywood noticed that the show was beginning to veer off its path back in 2019. “It’s been interesting to come up with some unusual things this year – the challenges I think have been scaled back a little bit,” he told Metro at the time. “I thought sometimes we’ve been running away with some of the challenges being too difficult.”
“On [season] one, people could approach them and make them and want to enjoy making them. But if you make them too difficult people will go, ‘Not interested, I was with you right up until that point and then you’ve lost me.'”
Co-host Prue Leith shared a similar sentiment. “Sometimes you can see a baker in the beginning and you think he or she will be fantastic and will just walk it. And it’s quite worrying because you don’t really want somebody to just gallop ahead,” she said. “[But] they all at some point do really badly, so there’s a sort of seesaw and it’s really confusing.”
