Is It Cake? is currently the most popular game show on Netflix. I have recently been asked by The Last Estate to review Is It Cake? as part of my punishment for ejaculating on Jake Blackwood’s bonsai tree after a particularly heinous absinthe binge.

 

The basic premise of Is It Cake? is as follows:

 

Every week, a simpering idiot by the name of Mikey Day asks several men and woman, all of whom you would happily kill, whether something is cake or not. Sometimes it’s cake, sometimes it’s not. Cake. Not cake. Cake. Not Cake. They have to guess from a long way away, which means it all boils down to luck. If you have seen the dull-but-not-totally-awful Mike Judge vehicle Idiocracy then this show is mostly Ow! My Balls! But made for white women who think Paula Deen is the reincarnation of Christ.

 

Mikey cuts through each object with a sharp knife/samurai sword until they find the one that is cake. Sometimes they aren’t cake. If you guess incorrectly, you don’t lose as such, you just fuck off for that specific episode and return next time to guess whether something is cake or not. If you guess the correct answer, you get to bake some cake. You become the baker. Now it is you who must do the fooling, you who must bake the realistic cakes, and some other people guess. After every round, Mikey gums at the camera and says that was intense. He says this after every single round, even if it wasn’t intense.

 

Is It Cake? is based on a meme that circulated last year where people couldn’t work out whether something was cake or not. This lays even more shit frosting on top of what is already an incredibly depressing thing to have to watch. The people who are making the cakes are undoubtedly talented. The cakes are realistic to the point that it becomes pretty difficult to tell which one is cake. They also show, in great detail, how they make the cakes. The show lasts an hour – which is insane – and at no point does it justify that length.

 

The issue here isn’t the cakes. The issue is that at the end of each episode, they sacrifice a child.

 

This is where it gets weird. What was previously a fairly mundane, shitty baking show becomes something really fucking dark. I went back to the Netflix menu a couple of times because I assumed the show had buffered wrong somehow, but they definitely do this shit.

 

Each episode’s kid is already knocked-out when they bring them out and is lying naked on an altar covered in Betty Crocker Whipped Fudge Frosting. Mikey Day comes on in a white robe, holding a ceremonial dagger studded with jelly-beans. He stares straight at the camera and whispers ‘this is not cake’ before plunging the dagger into the heart of the sacrifice. He stares at the camera as the writhing, dying child plays out its final moments behind him. Then all of the contestants from that show crawl on their hands and knees towards the altar. They are holding Funfetti cake-mix, which they pour into the wounds caused by Mikey Day’s dagger. A chant starts up.

 

This is now cake. This is now cake. This is now cake.

 

The contestants dig their fingers into the wound, pulling out entrails now covered in Funfetti. It’s like something from The Night of the Living Dead but it’s really happening.

 

This is now cake. This is now cake. This is now cake.

 

Each show ends with Mikey Day consuming the eyeballs of the child. As they dribble out of his mouth, he screams NOT CAKE! CAKE! NOT CAKE! CAKE!