Happy anniversary
First of all: I wrote a story!
It’s about how people in the past related to the ruins that surrounded them, and what those interactions can reveal about how they conceived of their own history. The idea that, as one archaeologist put it, “people in the past had their own past” is both obvious and surprising. Most of us have been socialized to see the past—and especially the precolonial past in the Americas and other colonized places—as static, mysterious, and somewhat mythical. (Think “lost cities,” etc.) Learning to see the role that ruins had in past communities can help us start to break out of that worldview and access something more interesting, more inclusive, and more true. Click the button to read more!
It’s been a while since I wrote a news story, and it took a lot of me. (Interviews! I love them, but they’re exhausting.) So the bulk of today’s newsletter is a rerun, from three years ago this month. Remember three years ago this month? Yeah. It was High Quarantine, I was still coping by working all the time, and collectively we were beginning to realize the pandemic and its disruptions were going to go on a lot longer than we initially thought.
It’s still going on. People are still getting sick, staying sick, and dying. Do not let anyone lie to you about that, or tell you it doesn’t matter. But just like we’ll never go “back to normal,” or “back” anywhere, we also haven’t stayed in those first terrifying months. For me, this was the first anniversary where it felt like I was remembering the beginning of quarantine, rather than still experiencing it.
To honor where we’ve been, where we are, and what we survived to get here, I’m republishing the best thing I wrote during/about High Quarantine: an analysis of the Netflix baking show Nailed It! Please enjoy.
In praise of Nailed It!
Especially season 4
In the middle of an episode of the fourth season of Nailed It!, host Nicole Byer rolls over the judges’ table, thuds to the floor, and continues rolling completely off the set, all the while screaming “PANIC!!!!!” This is the moment when I knew there would never be a piece of culture that more perfectly captures the experience of quarantine than the most recent season of Netflix’s surreal and ridiculous baking competition show.
If you haven’t heard of Nailed It!, or previously respected your time too much to consider watching it, here is the premise. Amateur bakers—and I mean very amateur; like, they have baked maybe two to three times in their entire lives1—are presented with elaborate desserts, ornately decorated with fondant and modeling chocolate, and instructed to recreate them within impossibly short time limits. The point is not to learn anything (neither for the contestants or the audience) or to make something that tastes or looks good. The point is for everyone, including the contestants, to laugh at hideous simulacra of beautiful things. And reader, I laugh a every single reveal. That’s at least six times in every 30 minute episode! It’s a foolproof recipe (sorry) for joy.
Much of the show’s charm comes from the improbable and infectious chemistry between the hosts/judges, the boisterous comedian Nicole Byer and the refined pastry chef Jacques Torres. They’ve managed to nail (sorry again) a very tricky tone, in which kindness and generosity reign even as the entire point of the show is to tease people about things they’ve done badly. This is what people usually write about when they write about Nailed It!, and rightfully so. It’s a hard balance to strike, and they make it seem effortless.
So that’s why I already loved Nailed It!, and why I was thrilled and relieved to see season 4 pop up on our Netflix just as quarantine began in earnest. I could never have anticipated, however, just how perfectly this season in particular would capture the mood of this world historical moment. This could not have been consciously planned, as production presumably wrapped months ago, and thus I am counting it as a pandemic miracle.
Each episode of Nailed It! is extremely formulaic, which is part of what makes it so comforting to watch. But in the universe of the show—and maybe in real life too—that also means the judges are trapped in an endless loop of tedium, disappointment, and failure. In an inversion of that classic definiton of insanity, they are forced to do the same thing over and over again, knowing they will never, ever, ever get a different or meaningfully better result. In season 4, Nicole and Jacques (but especially Nicole) start commenting on and gently chafing against their fate. In the first episode, Nicole turns to her companion and asks, “Do you ever find it ironic that you are a highly decorated, well-respected pastry chef and you have to eat trash every day for money?” Jacques responds with some bullshit about it being an opportunity for teaching—already long established as definitely not the point of this show—and then they proceed to eat trash and think of something nice to say to the person who served it to them.
These metatextual commentaries continue throughout the season. My favorite one is when gymnast and Olympic gold metalist Gabby Douglas watches the bakers not bother to measure their ingredients—again! What are they thinking?!—and asks, with the earnest puzzlement of a lifelong overachiever, “Do people not study to come on this show?” And Nicole sighs with true weariness and says, “I don’t think they do.”
Nailed It! has always commented on its making, if not as explicitly as it does this season. Most notably, the show references and sometimes shows its crew, especially the hot and stoic assistant director who is also a recurring character. Season 4 further expands the show’s universe to include more of backstage, from the catering table to an imaginary office fridge shared by all Netflix stars. Having been on the set of one competition reality show—my dad and I got tattoos on a competition show for tattoo artists; now you know all my secrets—my impression is that the banter and camaraderie between the people on screen and the people putting them there is a big part of the experience of filming a show like this. But beyond the bounds of the set, it’s almost never shown or recognized. Another defining feature of filming a competition reality show is waiting around and being bored, for extremely long and unpredictable stretches of time. You feel that even if you’re a contestant for a day, but you definitely feel it if you’re a host or a crew member.
My hypothesis about Nailed It! season 4 is that they were trying to capture and share some of what it felt like to film it—the boredom, the repetition, the enclosed universe of a set, the tension and vulnerability of subjecting yourself to an experience you know will be unpleasant but have nevertheless willingly signed up for. The foolproof recipe becomes a prison in which nothing changes and yet you still somehow have no idea what to expect.
Sound familiar? It does to me. What (may have) started as an experiment in bottling the looniness of a reality show set suddenly, unexpectedly became a pitch-perfect depiction of the emotional reality of quarantine. But the beauty of watching Nailed It! season 4 right now doesn’t just come from the impossible-to-foresee resonance between our lives and the experiences of reality show hosts. It also comes from the fact that Nicole and Jacques solider on through their endless loops with something like grace. They don’t ignore the weirdness of the situation; in fact, they embrace it and sometimes give into it, as when Nicole rolls offstage screaming. Still, the formula persists, bad cakes continue to be made and eaten, the (imagined) audience continues to laugh. There’s nothing to do but keep going, giggling incredulously at how this became your life.
Correction, April 2023: Since this essay was originally published, I’ve learned from inside sources that the contestants on Nailed It! love baking in their regular lives and have a lot more experience than I assumed. This makes their commitment to not measuring ingredients even more mystifying.