'The Great British Baking Show' Season 16's Bakers Are Freshly Risen

After nearly two decades on the air, The Great British Baking Show is something of an institution in British culture. For its first decade, it also debuted like clockwork in the same spot in the calendar, right after the three-day bank holiday at the end of August. Even when the show moved from the BBC to Channel 4, the new network ensured it arrived in the same place it always did, to help ease the transition. It wasn't until the pandemic that the show wound up pushed back to the end of the month, due to the new truncated filming schedule.

That's not been the case in America. When the series was on PBS, it wasn't treated like a national show, but rather as a local addition that went wherever stations felt like it: alongside their cooking shows, alongside their British Shows, or just where there was a convenient slot to fit it, and, as previously discussed, it aired seasons out of order. When Netflix took over, it binge-dropped the first two seasons as a unit, only to realize that the only way the show would continue to be the hit they thought they'd purchased was to turn it into a weekly series, which just so happened to coincide with the end of the decade.

Since the decision to proceed despite the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Baking Show has maintained its debut at the end of September. Even after the show returned to its original 10-week filming schedule in the spring, rather than the five-week version in July, Channel 4 kept the show in the later spot for continuity's sake. However, Channel 4 has finally decided it's time to return to the old ways, especially since the last few seasons have been such disasters.