Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dr. Seuss Baking Challenge’ on Prime Video, a Fun and Family-Friendly Culinary Competition Series (2024)

Who doesn’t love a baking challenge? And if you’re going to have a baking challenge, why not have some Whos in it? In the brand-new Dr. Seuss Baking Challenge on Amazon Prime Video, the wild and whimsical world of the beloved and prolific children’s author serves as the theme for a team-based baking competition. From The Cat in the Hat to the Grinch, there’s plenty of familiar faces sure to be represented in cake and pastry.

DR. SEUSS BAKING CHALLENGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The first teams of bakers step into the competition set, the so-called “City of Seuss”, an appropriately whimsical and garish landscape of amazing colors and wild characters. They giggle with nervous delight at the competition ahead.

The Gist: The holidays are a great time for baking, and Dr. Seuss Baking Challenge takes a pretty standard competition baking show format and gives it a fresh sheen of Seuss, structuring a nine-team, eight-episode elimination format around the work of the much-loved children’s author, with each new challenge pulling from Theodor Geisel’s deep library of characters and stories. Tamara Mowry-Housley hosts, and a range of top pastry chefs step in as guest judges as the bakers look to take Seuss from the page to the pastry.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s got the same whimsical tone as many of the Food Network’s fancy-cake shows, and a touch of Nailed It!, but really, the whole point here is to remind you of all the familiar Dr. Seuss stories you know and love.

Our Take: There’s certainly no lack of baking competition shows on television these days, from the gold standard set by The Great British Baking Show to the gleeful mishaps of Nailed It! on down to the countless seasonal and themed efforts on the Food Network. Entering this fray is a new entry from Amazon Prime Video, a fully Dr. Seuss-themed competition that draws from the prolific works of Theodor Geisel.

You won’t find any reinventing the wheel in this show–there’s the usual mounds of sculpted fondant and sprayed food coloring, the high-intensity cuts between stressed competitors mid-bake and on-screen interviews about their background, their strategy, and their recounting of their feelings as their bakes progressed. If you’re a fan of baking shows, you’ll find the format extremely familiar.

All that said, the Dr. Seuss angle makes for an especially fun family viewing, something I can vouch for as the parent of children who love both baking shows and Dr. Seuss; I watched a preview of this show with my six- and seven-year old kids, and they giggled with delight seeing the characters they know and love take shape in sugar, flour and butter. (They even asked if we could try to do some of the bakes ourselves, which would probably be a lot closer to Nailed It!, given my lack of baking skills.) Dr. Seuss Baking Challenge isn’t breaking any new ground in television, but it’s a satisfying confection for whole-family viewing, and an especially well-timed one as it drops right before winter break sends the little ones home from school.

It’s the kind of thing you can comfortably leave them alone in front of the TV to watch, but you’ll probably find yourself sitting down to watch and rooting for your favorite team of bakers too.

Sex and Skin:I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but rest assured there is nothing inappropriate here; this is definitely family-friendly viewing.

Parting Shot: Two teams celebrate as they move on to the next round; one has to face the prospect of going home. But we’ve only just begun, with six additional teams yet to be met, and another seven episodes to go before the Seuss-iest bakers can be crowned.

Sleeper Star: It’s hard to know who’s going to be the breakout star of the series from the first episode, owing to the unique competition format; the show is pitting nine teams against each other, starting with sets of three teams in each of the first three episodes, then shifting to a bracket of six after that. That said, early credit has to be given to Kyle and Huiwen for making a “Seussembouche”, a spin on the architecturally-ambitious French classic croquembouche, a tower of cream puff doughnuts bound together by spun sugar.

Most Pilot-y Line:”I approach baking and pastries the same way an artist approaches a canvas,” notes South Carolina-based executive pastry chef Kyle Smothers, “I push boundaries, I want to think outside of the box, it’s my individual sparkle and it’s who I am that will lead to success here in The City of Seuss.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you need a family-friendly viewing experience, Dr. Seuss Baking Challenge is a satisfying confection that’ll leave a sweet taste in your mouth.

ScottHinesis an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky who publishes the widely-belovedAction Cookbook Newsletter.