Starke Reality: Zumbo’s Just Desserts is just ... dull?
It seems Australia has had a taste of Zumbo’s Just Desserts, and decided Zumbo’s is just a bit lame-o, Petra Starke writes.
Opinion
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Does a “salt tooth” exist? You know, like a “sweet tooth”, but for chips? If so, I have one. I might have a whole mouth full, to be honest; it’s quite possible I’m a medical marvel.
I can easily walk past cake, ice cream and chocolate without so much as a twinge of temptation. I don’t care for lollies at all, and those “freak shake” milkshakes covered in bits of brownie and whipped cream repulse me.
But set a bowl of crunchy, salty chips in my eyeline and I’m done.
Or rather, they are. Ditto for anything involving peanut butter. And frankly I can’t be left alone with garlic bread, it doesn’t turn out well for either of us.
So maybe it’s no surprise that I just can’t warm to Zumbo’s Just Desserts, the confection cooking competition which has returned to Channel Seven after a three-year hiatus.
It seems I’m not the only one.
I mean, the three-year hiatus is something of a clue; the show’s debut season back in 2016 ended with such poor ratings it sank like a marshmallow in hot chocolate.
Two years later, Netflix picked it up and the show seemed to find a sweet spot with an international audience, which is perhaps what got Seven interested in bringing it back.
They’ve likely crashed from that sugar high now, after Zumbo season two debuted to a fairly bland 446,000 viewers nationwide last Sunday, before slumping like a souffle to finish at just 385,000 on Wednesday night.
It seems Australia has had a taste, and decided Zumbo’s just a bit lame-o. If you haven’t seen it (and with those ratings I’m going to assume you haven’t), Zumbo’s Just Desserts is basically MasterChef, but for sweets.
In fact MasterChef is pretty much the reason this show even exists at all – it was the launching pad for host Adriano Zumbo, who was a relatively unknown Sydney patissier before he showed off his croquembouche on season one and became a household name overnight. (Which is weird, because usually people get banned from TV for doing that)
Zumbo is curiously charmless on camera. He tends to speak in monotone, and his eyebrows don’t move, like he’s always a bit half asleep. Maybe it’s a sugar crash.
He’s lifted a bit by his co-host, the impossibly winsome British TV cook Rachel Khoo, in a retina-searing set that looks like the design directive was “Willy Wonka on meth”.
There isn’t a single surface that hasn’t been daubed in pink or covered in sprinkles or made to look like a giant lollipop; even poor Khoo is dressed so twee it’s like she’s been held hostage by a marauding gang of My Little Ponies.
If you can get over all that, then there’s the contestants. Part of the joy of shows like MasterChef and Top Chef is they have seriously skilled contestants who turn out incredible dishes. But Zumbo’s guys ... are just ... not very good. In Monday’s dessert tower challenge one woman made a “unicorn” cake that looked like chunks of Scotch Brite glued together, while another bloke ended up with what looked like a diseased hippo’s foot tangled in olive branches.
“I don’t even want to look at Rachel and Zumbo eating my dessert,” he lamented. That made two of us.
Netflix has another, much more fun, dessert competition show called Nailed It, where amateur cooks do a terrible job of replicating professionally decorated cakes with hilarious results. If only Zumbo would borrow a cup of sugar from that show, Just Desserts might be a bit more appetising.