‘The Great British Baking Show’/’Derry Girls’ Crossover was the First and Last Good Thing to Happen in 2020

It’s honestly something of a Christmas miracle that American Netflix subscribers can now watch The Great British Baking Show: Holidays episode featuring the cast of Derry Girls. For years, The Great British Baking Show has welcomed British celebs into the tent to duke it out for the dual forces of comedy and charity. Until now, though, none of those episodes have been legally screened in the United States outside of YouTube clips. So getting to watch the Derry Girls invade the tent on Netflix is an absolute treat. More than that, because the episode marks the first official Baking Show episode of 2020, the Great British Baking Show/Derry Girls crossover is somehow the first and last good thing to happen this year. The episode is full of the unbridled chaos that would come to define 2020, along with the unwitting optimism we all ambled into this dreaded year with over 11 months ago.

Real talk: As soon as I learned last winter that Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Nicola Coughlan, Dylan Llewellyn, and Siobhán McSweeney would be participating in their own mini bake off for The Great British Baking Show: Holidays, I was desperate to see it. The five actors all star in Derry Girls, an insanely perfect sitcom set in 1990s Northern Ireland. Jackson, O’Donnell, Coughlan, Llewellyn, and the absent Louisa Harland play the titular “Derry Girls.” (And yes Dylan Llewellyn’s character James is a Derry Girl. If you have seen the Season 2 finale, you’d understand!) McSweeney plays the teenagers’ darkly droll teacher, Sister Michael. Together the ensemble is riotously funny as folks just trying to get through life against the backdrop of the tumultuous troubles.

Derry Girls is hilarious, heartfelt, and chock full of bizarrely specific jokes that make the Irish Catholic girl in me cringe-laugh in recognition. To see any part of it collide with my beloved Great British Baking Show? Ugh, I’m in heaven.

All this is to say that the episode was worth the wait and more. That more? Well, the fact that it doubles as a bizarre time capsule for the year 2020. As you’ll keep hearing Paul Hollywood, Prue Leith, Noel Fielding, and (in her last outing as a host) Sandi Toksvig say, this episode was meant to air on January 1, 2020. It was the New Years’ episode. And it is full of the giddy hope and foolish optimism so many of us carried into the start of 2020. How were we to know how many horrors awaited us? The cast of Derry Girls certainly didn’t! And so they eagerly toast 2020 with drinks and jokes and hilariously sweet cakes.

So technically speaking, this very special episode of The Great British Baking Show: Holidays was the first good and true and wholesome thing to happen in 2020. It was also, possibly, the last good thing to happen to?

Okay, I kid. It was baller when Parasite won Best Picture and Bong Joon-ho made two of his Oscars kiss. I was also thrilled when Zendaya won the Emmy for Euphoria. And everything Egbert had done on my Animal Crossings: New Horizon island is precious to my heart. So it wasn’t the last good thing to happen in 2020…but technically it might be?

Hear me out: getting the Derry Girls episode of The Great British Baking Show just as 2020 is winding down makes it feel oddly emblematic of the roller coaster of this year. Sure we went into the year with similar giddy excitement to how Jackson, O’Donnell, Coughlan, Llewellyn, and McSweeney entered the tent, but things also took an immediate turn south…as it did for the cast of Derry Girls. Cakes collapsed, dough flew, jelly turned into slime, and various levels of distress took over everyone’s spirit…

…and yet, everyone was okay in the end? Mostly? Sure some of the actors had to swallow the disappointment of messing up. There was cake batter flying and a general sense of panicked chaos in the tent. But in the end, they made it through. Perhaps it is my nature to read metaphor into everything — after all, I was an English major — but as 2020 winds down, there’s something darkly comic about considering all the bullshit we (mostly) survived.

Ironically, The Great British Baking Show kicked off 2020 in the UK with an episode that was full of 2020 energy. It was messy. It was stressful. Most of all, it threw Derry Girls actors Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Nicola Coughlan, Dylan Llewellyn, and Siobhán McSweeney in a situation they were not prepared to handle. Heck, Jackson hadn’t even baked a cake before entering the tent! Somehow, though, the Derry Girls cast made it through.

The Derry Girls cast’s good humor and cries of exasperation in this episode of The Great British Baking Show: Holidays were as cathartic to watch as they were entertaining. And once more, a cast known for their ability to inject traumatic times with dark, all-too-human humor, made an all-too-2020 episode of The Great British Baking Show hilarious as sin.

Watch The Great British Baking Show: Holidays on Netflix

Watch Derry Girls on Netflix