The Great British Baking Show seems like it's running out of ideas

HuffPost

"Eleven seasons and hundreds of challenges later, it must be more difficult for the show’s production team to come up with new ideas for each new set of bakers and avoid repeating previous recipes or themes," says Marina Fang. "The bakers often talk about having watched earlier seasons of Bake Off, which remains one of the U.K.’s most popular shows. Some of them even reference having baked recipes from the judges’ cookbooks and studied their techniques, so they already know what they’ll be judged on — especially by the ubiquitous Hollywood. So we get these strange theme weeks, like the aforementioned mess that was Japanese Week and the less cringeworthy but still befuddling ’80s Week. This season’s challenges have also included making rainbow bagels and brownies — the latter of which none of the bakers were able to master, for some inexplicable reason. During Cake Week, the bakers had to construct and sculpt their cakes into busts of their favorite celebrity. The resulting creations — which were hilariously bad but in an endearing way — seemed like they belonged on Netflix’s Nailed It! instead."