'The Great British Baking Show' Bares Its Reality Show Seams

From an American perspective, The Great British Baking Show has enjoyed a unique place among its reality show brethren, a moral high ground obtained primarily from the noticeable lack of cutthroat antics. Even I’ve caught myself carefully distancing it when describing the series: “It’s a baking competition but it’s not, you know, like a reality show.” The label itself feels like something reserved only for shows that traffic in sensationalism, the Love Islands of the world. I have no interest in a new bombshell entering the villa, thank you very much. I’ve got a date with twelve bakers of varying degrees of wholesomeness.

Going into last week’s semifinal, I envisioned several scenarios that could possibly take place. Maybe Tom would experience a resurgence of luck after a less-than-stellar few weeks, or some other seasonal narrative would pay off. My guess was Aaron would get that elusive Hollywood handshake at long last. Instead, what we got was one of the most shocking eliminations in Great British Baking Show history. Once I gave it some thought, however, what made it shocking was how engineered the moment felt and how it revealed the reality show seams beneath the garment considered by most to be 100% cozy competition.

Tonally, the show felt off in the first five minutes, when Tom, seemingly on the verge of describing the creme horns he planned to present for the Signature Challenge to the judges, is subjected to an unusually mean Paul Hollywood zinger: “Can I just see your fingernails? Oh, right, they are still there, ‘cause you’ve been hanging on by them for a while.” Wow.

It’s the kind of commentary that feels plucked out of Hell’s Kitchen rather than the genteel show so many of us have come to love—misplaced rage against Gordon Ramsey’s rough puff recipe, perhaps. It’s been a while since Tom’s knocked it out of the park, but he’s been far from disastrous; he won the Technical Challenge the previous week, and the complaints about his black sesame Basque cheesecake and Greek trifle can be summarized as ‘not flavorful enough.’ Not only does the negativity feel out of place, but the chosen target feels somewhat arbitrary, especially when there’s other bakers whose performance has wavered just as much (coughAaroncough).

The rest of the episode is pretty standard for the remainder—with exception of an elaborate Technical Challenge made more difficult by the unnecessary sugar glass dome to accompany an already fussy French framboisier—with Jasmine making mincemeat of the rest of the competitors, and even she couldn’t get that sugar dome done in time (a moment of silence for Tom’s perfect dome, which I watched go towards that freezer shelf in slow motion horror).

Once the Showstopper Challenge judgment was underway, the elimination process seemed to come down to Tom and Aaron. Tom’s dark chocolate hive with bee-shaped macarons filled with white chocolate/mango and dark chocolate/sour cherry was a misfire for the judges, despite his flavors being good—possibly controversial: I don’t think Tom went that awry when it comes to the brief; his hive could have been a bit smaller but he displayed as much chocolate as Toby did gingerbread. Indeed, the only contestant to fully cover their base was Aaron, but his sloth unfortunately had other … design concerns.

None of this mattered, because in the biggest upset since Hermine’s elimination back in 2020, Toby was the competitor chosen to go home. His creme horns (chocolate/coffee ganache with coffee liqueur paired with meringue-topped lemon curd/thyme mousseline) and charming display of white chocolate ganache and lemon curd with dark chocolate and hazelnut/peanut praline macarons somehow didn’t warrant making it into the final (the “Lemons” sign!), despite Aaron’s incomplete sloth with badly baked macarons, and Tom’s bee hive.

People will be quick to point out that Toby’s melted framboisier was his undoing, but this yet again invites the question of when does the Technical Challenge matter because Aaron fared only slightly better and was dead last in the Technical Challenge the previous week. Even if one were to consider these two competitors on equal footing, Toby’s exhibited greater consistency, typically the hallmark of the seasons’ finalists.

It’s a choice so unexpected and so without warning that it has a producer’s touch to it, the sort of puppet dangling mechanisations that’s a level or two below Married at First Sight. It’s especially jarring for a season that’s been relatively tame when it comes to who gets awarded Star Baker and who goes home, possibly with the exception of Pui Man’s surprisingly early exit back in Bread Week. But for many Baking Show fans, the show’s very appeal comes from its tameness, where dramatic surprises are to be found within the circumstances surrounding the bakes. I can acknowledge that being surprised that the business of running a competition series is subject to the same reality show manipulations is sort of like being astounded an exotic dancer is only interested in your money, but it’s tough to reconcile when the show seems so damn pure.

By the time this gets published, our friends on the other side of the pond will have learned who’s been announced as the winner of this season’s Baking Show, though for those of us stateside, the finale won’t be available for several more days. Although I can hazard a guess at who the winner may be, I’m still interested in watching how everything shakes out. Imbuing the quality of innocence on any entity reliant on commercial appeal, even one seemingly as free of schemes and material trappings as The Great British Baking Show, is a colossal error. Enjoy the sweetness of the camaraderie and the coziness that comes with watching craftsmen at work, but at the end of the day, it exists to make money. My newfound cynicism is an unexpected addition to my favorite competition show, but it’s a necessary one, unlike that tacked-on sugar dome.

The finale of 2025’s The Great British Baking Show will be available to stream in the U.S. this Friday.

Kaleena Rivera is the TV Editor for Pajiba.