Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Candy Cruz’ on Max, a Sitcom About a Wannabe Chef Who Finds Herself Competing on a Cooking Show

Candy Cruz (now streaming on Max) is a TV series about a TV series, but thankfully it’s not one of those TV series that’s about itself. No, it’s the story of a young wannabe chef-slash-restaurateur who finds herself on a cooking competition show, mostly against her will, because everyone around her believes she’s an amazing cook, and they pretty much force her to do it, but she thinks the show is totes garbs. The first three episodes of this Mexican single-camera sitcommy series are on Max now; we consumed the first one, and found it INSERT FOOD METAPHOR HERE WITH A SLIGHTLY NEGATIVE CONNOTATION (YOU KNOW, LIKE “IT NEEDS MORE SPICE”). 

CANDY CRUZ: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Candy dials up the song “Besame” by Juan Gabriel on her phone. 

The Gist: Candy (Cassandra Sanchez Navarro) boogie-woogies in the kitchen, using a sifter as a lip-sync microphone, as she concocts some delicious-ass food. She introduces herself via voiceover: Her mother (Dalilah Polanco) is a hairdresser. Her father vamoosed the moment he found out he was going to be a dad. She was raised by her grandmother, who taught her the joy of cooking: “To her, cooking and playing were the same thing,” she says as we see young Candy and her grandma dancing in the kitchen. Weirdly, she says the one thing she inherited from her grandmother is “her music.” Kinda thought it might be her recipes or kitchen acumen, but apparently not? 

Anyway, here in the present, Candy does… I don’t know what. Does she have a job? Might get to that in a later episode, I guess? She makes sumptuous meals for her mother and grandfather, who bicker and squabble. Cooking for family and friends is Candy’s passion, and a means for her to express her love. Mom runs her own salon, and specializes in outdated ’80s hairspray giganto-dos with bangs that go up to here and out to there; she also specializes in pointing out how Grandpa is unemployed and how Candy’s boyfriend Manolo (Fabrizio Santini) is also unemployed, but now how Candy is unemployed? Unless she’s employed? All we see her do is go to the market and mingle with familiars while she picks up all the delicious stuff to make all her delicious stuff. 

Maybe that’s why Grandpa and Mom and Manolo all managed to get along for just long enough to conspire behind her back to enter her application for Sabor Secreto, a cooking competition show hosted by handsome slickster Emiliano (Eugenio Siller) and run by fascist dictator producer Barbara (Erika Buenfil). Candy thinks shows like that are annoying obnoxious junk, and when she’s accepted for the show, she initially resists. She and Manolo like to go sit outside fancy restaurants and watch people eat, because they can’t afford to actually dine there – and Manolo gently reminds her that the winner of Sabor Secreto goes on to open their own restaurant. It would fulfill her dream. 

That pitch erodes her reluctance a bit. In voiceover, we learn Candy yearns to meet her father someday, and that anxiety ties to that time we see in flashback when she was a kid and everyone had to get up in front of everyone else and talk about their fathers, and instead of talking about her father, about whom she knows nothing, she wet herself. But now she’s an adult and will absolutely stay dry on the set of Sabor Secreto, right? OF COURSE. 

On the big day, Mom does Candy’s hair up in a conglomeration of tight curls that’s so huge, satellites start spontaneously orbiting it. She’s backstage getting ready when Barbara walks in and nixes that ridiculous do, until Emiliano comes to Candy’s defense. The curls stay. Back home, Mom sends Grandpa up to the roof to fix the antenna so they and all the ladies who hang at the salon can watch Candy whoop alla them asses with her whisk and spatula. They get it situated just in time to see all the contestants’ introductions, which includes Candy getting a bucket of water dumped over her head. The curls are gone. Barbara chuckles. She’s the captain of this ship and this is how she asserts her power, it seems. 

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Candy Cruz has a wacky vibe along the lines of Scrubs, mixed with a dysfunctional-family sitcom (likely a few generational steps evolved from Roseanne) with Top Chef or Chopped thrown in, complete with lingering closeups of delicious-looking food.

Our Take: The first 30 minutes of Candy Cruz isn’t overwhelming or underwhelming. It just delivers a mild bit of whelm. It establishes Candy as a protagonist with a handful of boilerplate traits (she, uh, likes overalls?), a bit of passion (fig pie!), a weepy hook (wants to meet her father) and two parallel humiliating moments (wet pants, wet head) to render her sympathetic. You don’t dislike her, but you also don’t get to know her particularly well in this debut episode; the method it uses to get us on her side is to make her the punchline of broad, clichéd slapstick comedy. I groan in its general direction,

The pilot establishes a familiar dynamic, where the protagonist is a well-adjusted sweetheart among a collection of outsized obnoxios and nutmeats: Her grandpa the conspiracy theorist, the gossips in the salon, her slacker boyfriend, her brash mother who has all the drive and verve around here and where would everybody be without her? Candy is caught in the middle of this maelstrom of mild stereotypes, and one hopes her character comes into crisper focus in subsequent episodes. Between that and the lame punchline of the final scene, Candy Cruz is off to a disappointingly flavorless start, as if it derived from a prepackaged sitcom premise, just add water.

Sex and Skin: None so far (the series is rated TV-14).

Parting Shot: Barbara laughs as Candy stands in front of the cameras, soaked. “When I say no, it means no,” Barbara snarls.

Sleeper Star: Polanco shows considerable spirit and zhuzh as Candy’s outspoken and colorful mother. 

Most Pilot-y Line: Candy talks about her long-lost father – and almost certainly engages in some foreshadowing – in voiceover: “These are the kind of mysteries that get solved when you least expect it.”

Our Call: Dammit, I’m going to use a hacky food metaphor: For some, the familiar formula of Candy Cruz will be like comfort food. For the rest of us, though, it’s pretty bland. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.