Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorne.

Look, baking a cake is hard, especially if you're trying to make a pretty or knit cake that

gives your local bakery a run for its money.

Exhibit A, the great British bake off on Netflix.

It's a reality competition show where the contestants spend years honing their craft, making

countless iterations of the same black-forest mocha-cream sponge thing.

On that show, if something in your cake is off even a little bit, maybe there's too

much lemon or too much cardamom, maybe your mirror glaze never quite sets right.

Well, bad news, you're going home.

Then there's Exhibit B, nailed it, which is also on Netflix.

Nailed it takes the same basic premise, bring people together in a big kitchen, have them

make a big pretty cake.

Only none of the people know anything about baking or cooking, and instead of four hours,

we give them 90 minutes, what could possibly go wrong.

The answer, of course, is everything, sad, droopy cupcakes that are barely baked, burnt

fondant monstrosities, ingredients, materializing that were never in the recipe.

Nailed it is a celebration of failure, an ode to, well, at least you tried your best.

Maybe that's good enough.

The baked goods are never pretty.

The tone is never mean, and the show is always very, very funny.

Nicole Byer hosts Nailed it, she's great at it.

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