Baby Spice Emma Bunton is Secretly a Great TV Host

In the midst of the holiday hullabaloo, I found myself rapt up in the calming pleasures of The Great American Baking Show: Holiday Edition on Hulu. Shorter than its uber-popular English cousin, The Great British Baking Show, but no less sweet, the three-part series lulled me into the holiday spirit week after week. And perhaps no one on the show wowed me more than new host Emma Bunton. That’s right, Baby Spice is back. She’s all grown up and she might actually be the best TV presenter to come out of the original Spice Girls.

Bunton is introduced at the start of The Great American Baking Show‘s Holiday specials as a new face on the series. (Which was nice to know because, between you and me, I skipped all the past seasons of this show so I didn’t know what was normal and what was weird.) Bunton joins “Spice” Adams, Paul Hollywood, and fellow newbie, judge Sherry Yard in the festive-themed tent, and for my money, she kind of silently out-shines the lot of them. Paul Hollywood doesn’t bring anything necessarily new to his tough bread guy schtick, so I wasn’t exactly wowed by his performance. Sherry Yard is fun and zippy, and I would love to see more from her, but you expect the judges to bring the sass. Spice Adams was kind of a sweet, bumbling non-starter. But Emma Bunton was a revelation. Reality television is littered with former pop stars and teen actors attempting to reboot their careers as presenters, but Bunton has got the goods to make it an actual thing.

In every shot, Bunton is alert in a charming, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed sort of way. It’s not that she has the syrupy demeanor of a morning news host — she has her sense of irony in tow — but she has an aura that welcomes you to the show. You feel safe in Bunton’s care, which is how a television host should make you feel. Bunton’s whole manner is tailor-made for TV. She’s fun, friendly, and really good at voiceover. So much so that the show kind of kicks Spice Adams to the curb for a huge part of the series: the narration. Every bake is described in detail by Emma Bunton, and her crisp British accent lends the show a sense of serenity and credibility. Does that sound dumb? Well, aesthetic charms do sound dumb when they’re broken down intellectually like that.

This is all to say that Emma Bunton is a really good TV host, and even if The Great American Baking Show: Holiday Edition doesn’t return next year, another network show should scoop Baby Spice up pronto. She’s got the goods to run a spectacular show, pop music-related or not.

Where to stream The Great American Baking Show