Joel McHale and ‘Crime Scene Kitchen’ Team Promise Season 3 Contestants Aren’t Less Skilled — the Game Has Just Gotten Much Harder
Watching the third season premiere of Fox’s mystery bakeoff competition “Crime Scene Kitchen” might have elicited quite a few “Come on!” groans from viewers at home.
From missing clues under sinks and in trash cans to not reading explicit instructions closely to making dishes that completely ignored certain ingredients that were laid out plainly for them, the Season 3 contestants who made their debut in the Sept. 26 episode seemed to stumble more than the crop of competitors who appeared in Season 2.
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Well, at least to those of us sitting comfortably at home, where we can play arm-chair baking detective at an expert level and yell out obvious directions to the bakers scouring the “Crime Scene Kitchen” on the Joel McHale-hosted series.
“Now that people know the show, thank God, they know there’s a lot of tricks now. On top of that, it is much different when you are in the actual crime scene than when you’re sitting at home,” McHale told Variety. “When you’re sitting at home, you’re gonna just ace ‘Jeopardy.’ You just nail that singing question: it’s freaking Lionel Richie! Then you get there, and all of a sudden, lights, cameras, travel, waking up early and you’re on the spot. And the game is definitely harder, just because people know what to expect and we had to make it harder. And I think it really is a testament to the the test bakers who have to be like, ‘All right, we’re doing a crepe cake now. We got to reverse engineer this thing.’ It’s a weird push and pull where you’re like, you can’t make it too hard, because then no one’s going to get it and it’s going to look impossible, and you can’t make it too easy.”
So while you’re watching Thursdays episode, where you’ll be introduced to Season 3’s second batch of bakers — these ones are the “friends” vs. last week’s “family” duos — let’s keep that in mind if someone forgets to check an abandoned apron for a clue.
“Crime Scene Kitchen” judges Yolanda Gampp and Curtis Stone say that friends-and-family twist is also going to increase the difficulty this year as the tension heats up in the kitchens with these personal pairings compared to Season 2, which featured home bakers competing against classically trained professionals. But they are on opposing sides when it comes to which group has it harder: the besties or the relatives.
“Yolanda and I feel a little differently. We’ve spoken about this at length being on set together for months,” Stone said. “My brother and I opened a restaurant together and he’s my business partner now. It’s a little bit nuanced, because he lives in Australia and is at arm’s length. But we did run the restaurant for about three years together, hand in hand. He was running the front, I was running the back. And like anything in business, you don’t always agree with the person that you’re working with, right? And I think the benefit of a family is you don’t hold back. You do say what you think. And you do have some of those moments that you end up screaming at each other. If that was a friend, you’d wake up and think, holy shit, what happened yesterday? Is it OK? Is it going to work out? Are we still going to be in business together? When it’s your brother, he ain’t going anywhere, neither am I. I think the family members have that slight advantage.”
Gampp countered: “I don’t know, because when we see the teams that are like mother and daughter, for example, that’s a very different dynamic than Curtis and his brother or two sisters. I mean, I would never tell off my mom. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t do it on camera.”
As Season 3 of “Crime Scene Kitchen” progresses, showrunner Conrad Green teases multiple new ways in which he and the other producers and test bakers have plotted to make the contestants’ lives that much harder.
“We have dabbled in savory. We are still largely a sweet show, but a little bit of savory and mixing it up is always good to add an extra layer of confusion,” Green said. “And we’re always trying to work out different ways to do clues, so [in an upcoming episode] when they searched the kitchen, there was a packet of edible flowers, but there was a couple of lines of flowers missing. And then halfway through the bake, we came along and showed them a photograph of the full packet. But in many cases, they then had to try and remember what the colors were in the package to see which one had been used. We do like that thing of adding extra clues during the course of the bake itself. But it’s kind of tricky to do it in such a way that it allows people to pivot without completely throwing them. You don’t want to do it so late that there’s nothing they can do anyway. The timing of these things is key in how we proceed.”
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