Lost Seasons of 'The Great British Baking Show' Finally Available in the U.S.

The Great British Baking Show comes but once a year on Netflix, partly due to the streaming service's hesitation to delve into the variations that PBS initially deemed "too British" and the older seasons the BBC didn't think were worth offering. However, for fans of the long-running reality show who have been missing their Sue & Mel fix or Mary Berry judgments can rejoice, as Roku has made a deal with producer Love Productions to stream all of the episodes from those early years on the BBC, even the ones that never aired on PBS or streamed on Netflix in the first place.

Netflix dropped the rights to the four later seasons of the BBC years, which it had via PBS, around the time it debuted GBBO Season 13. By then, the Channel 4 version of the show, which the streaming service refers to as "Netflix Originals" outside the U.K., had reached six seasons, plenty in its own right. Considering the massive casting turnover when the show moved house, those early editions (especially "Collection 2," which was from the series' initial BBC2 years) no longer felt like they belonged.

As we previously covered when Love Productions first left the BBC for Channel 4, the numbering system PBS initially implemented when it brought The Great British Bake Off to America was confusing viewers, especially as the older seasons aired out of order on public broadcasting simultaneously with Netflix picking up the new ones. (Both platforms debuted two completely different Season 5s, neither of which was actually Season 5, within ninety days of each other.) Netflix also overcomplicated things; instead of simply starting with Season 8 when it gained co-producer status, it attempted to maintain PBS' numbering system under the guise of "Collections."