Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Nailed It! Double Trouble’ On Netflix, Where Teams Of Two Screw Up Complicated Cakes Twice As Badly

Nailed It! Double Trouble is the fifth season of Netflix’s hilarious baking series Nailed It, where Byer and Torres give home bakers impossibly complex concept cakes to bake, with hilariously bad results. But in this season, teams of two will compete for the $10,000 prize and the vaunted Nailed It! trophy. As usual, not only will the cakes be judged on how close they got to the original concept, but if they taste decent, as well.

NAILED IT! DOUBLE TROUBLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Host Nicole Byer suggests to head judge Jacques Torres that they should have teams compete on the new season of Nailed It!, then immediately regrets it. So does Jacques, who is afraid they’ll get cakes “two times as bad.” Nicole is concerned that she won’t be able to keep track of all those names.

The Gist: The theme to the first episode is Greek gods, with Andrea Savage — who repeatedly mentions she’s 1/4 Greek — as a guest judge. She’s even wearing thunderbolts on her sweater. The teams — a brother-in-law and sister-in-law, a mother/daughter pair and two best friends — are first tasked to pick one of three gods and make a stacked cupcake sculpture of that god in 45 minutes. The mother-daughter team fight their way through the task, and it seems that the mother doesn’t measure anything. The two best friends’ cake goes awry when one of the fiends throws cream cheese into the batter while the other one is in the pantry.

The bigger challenge is to create a “Medusa makeover” cake, shaped like Medusa with sculpting chocolate to be used for the snakes in her hair. She is supposed to look like she’s in rollers and rouge getting a makeover done. The cake inside should be a honey cake with a baklava middle. Oh, and they have 90 minutes to do the whole thing. You can predict the results, especially when the mother-daughter team use Rice Krispies treats to make the snakes and completely leave the baklava out of the entire thing.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Nailed It! Seasons 1-4, which has always struck us as what would happen if Chopped didn’t take itself as seriously as it does. It helps that Byer can fill the boring moments with funny voices and movements and that Torres goes with the funny flow.

Our Take: If you’re expecting a different dynamic from Nailed It! because there are now teams of two competing instead of solo bakers, then you’ll be disappointed. Then again, if you like the show just the way it is, you’ll be delighted, because Double Trouble is the Nailed It! we know and love, just with the added factor of seeing teams bicker and stumble as they try to assemble these concept cakes that would make Buddy Valastro want to throw up his hands in frustration.

That’s always been the idea of Nailed It!, hasn’t it? It’s not that these people are “bad bakers”, it’s just that they are OK bakers who are given amazingly complex projects to do in very little time. It’s more than enough to ask them to make cupcakes in 45 minutes, much less ask them to let them cool, stack them, frost them, then cover them in fondant and decorate them with a precise artistic flair. The fact that just getting the batter and buttercream right is a chore to these people, it stands to reason that whatever they come up with will be a heaping mess.

In fact, the bakers fared better with the Medusa cake, even though their results were still way off the mark. Either way, the reveals never get old, and neither does the descriptions from Byer, Torres and the comedian guest judge.

Byer has set the standard, though, for all other comedian cooking/baking competition hosts to meet. She can improvise with the best of them, and when she deepened her voice to say “Hades” without skipping a chipper beat, we loved it. Her ability to laugh at the cakes but make the contestants laugh along with her is something that few hosts of shows like this have been able to master.

What Age Group Is This For?: Netflix puts Nailed It! in their kids profiles for a reason. This show is more or less suitable for kids 6 and up.

Parting Shot: The winners gets money shot at them, the Nailed It! trophy and the satisfaction of being the best bad bakers of the episode.

Sleeper Star: Gotta give this to “Cwis,” the stage manager, who dresses up like Cupid at one point in the show. A very large, muscular cupid.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nicole has never tasted baklava before? Wow, that’s a shock.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Nailed It! Double Trouble continues the funny tradition that the series has established during its previous four seasons. As long as Byer is at the wheel of this show, it’ll always be in good hands.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Nailed It! On Netflix