Mexican Week, or 'The Great British Baking Show's' Great British Self-Own

It took a decade, but The Great British Baking Show finally revealed its limitations. "Mexican Week" was always going to be cringe-worthy; it was just a matter of how bad it would get. The answer, from the moment Matt and Noel showed up wearing serapes in the show's painful introduction, was "worse." Anyone who has watched the Baking Show long enough knows the British understanding of Mexican food and flavors is, to put it politely, deeply flawed. An entire theme dedicated to it was asking for disaster.

In older seasons of GBBO, contestants occasionally did "Mexican" flavors. These usually were a weird cross of Spanish, Moroccan, and Indian spices liberally doused in chili oil and avocado, and Paul and Mary did not recognize the flavors as incorrect, proving their own limitations. More recently, Japanese Week was embarrassing. Paul styled himself as an expert after having vacationed there once, and none of the bakes were Japanese. These errors have not just been limited to foods from other continents either! Just last year, Jurgen sealed his fate during German Week after telling Paul, on camera, that the Showstopper was not just ludicrous but fundamentally misunderstood the dish.

However, Japanese and German dishes are foreign to most GBBO audiences, and those faux pas managed to fly over the average viewers' heads. And perhaps, had the series stayed a U.K. show, Mexican Week might have too. But the show is a massive hit in the U.S., and even people who have never been south of Kansas and only eaten at Chipolte and Taco Bell know the basics. That the show tried it was bad enough. That they showed their laziness and incuriosity by doing it without having done research into the culture featured was either arrogance or crass stupidity. Either way, this episode deserves the roasting it's getting.