It's one of Netflix's unforgivable crimes ---prompting me to cancel my subscription after 20 years--that they only gave us one short season of this very curious show. The reason is clear: it doesn't fit any category. There is no row for what it is, neither this nor that. It would have been perfect on local TV on Saturday mornings in the 70s, at like 5 AM, the golden hour between late-late show broadcasts of class horror movies and early morning cartoons. Yet it wouldn't fit in either. The only way I can describe it might be, if Tim Burton produced a puppet show from hell, starring a steady-handed, elegantly dressed, staggeringly talented fusion of Morticia Addams, Marthat Stewart and Bob Ross. She lives in a groovy mansion with her collection of muppet-esque animal friends, a mummified cat full of Waldo Lydecker-ish put-downs, a stray raccoon she rescued - wearing a pink bow, a big wolfman kind of a thing and monster in the basement who actually does eat one of the more obnoxious guests, and even a human male love interest who might be a serial killer. And he's not annoying!
That's why it was canceled perhaps - just too damn original. People go on the baking row or horror row or wherever and look for something random and see that thumbnail image with its fancy font (R), and it frightens the gentle folk in search of family values fun, yet makes its ideal audience (the types for whom Halloween is the best of all holidays) dismiss it as ye another PG-rated Sabrina/Hermione Granger-style sleuth and her quirky friends at a haunted school show. The type is by now inescapable on any streaming platform. You know the type, its hackneyed score coked with Elfman whimsy, its cast bursting with hot guys and older British actor suspects). This looks just like that, only with the heroine bake cakes between adventures, or running a small bakery--OMG, 2 Broke Girls crossed with Sabrina the Teenage Witch!
Even knowing the show, looking at that ad at right, you can't blame the target audience, if there even is any when we get right down to it, for scrolling past it. The macabre touches seem like some cheap gimmick, after thought quirk after Netflix saw the numbers on Sabrina. (I shudder to think what will become of poor Wednesday).
In other words, because someone at the Netflix top didn't have patience enough to let its weirdness slowly accrue a cult, and because the PR people had no idea what it was or who to market it too, rather than let it accrue a cult, they cut it off after one season.
Truth be told, I almost gave up on it myself. I watched two episodes still in a WTF kind of mood, it was as if Tim Burton produce a morning kid show, the type with arts, baking and crafts of a playful macabre nature?.
What's unique is the the vibe is in total rapport with the super mellow Christine, whose steady surgeon hands making this big elaborate cakes and cookies in the shapes of tarantulas, skeleton fingers, are a sight to see. There's also a kind of sand mandala Zen to it all as no sooner has she completed these time-intensive masterpieces, almost indistinguishable from cinematic reality, than she just eats them, or gives them away to be eaten. All without a second thought. For a girl who has amazing. clothes, furniture, and stuff (she got the job due to a popular Youtube channel showing off her elaborate place settings and gorgeous Victorian mansion) she is remarkably free of the kind of materialist furor that can possess artists afraid to let go of their work
So don't let the decor can fool you, trading in the mega-budget barrage of Burton production for a kind of muppet show austerity, it goes in such a strange direction you need awhile to tell if you even like it. McConnell's weird Martha Stewart meets Morticia Addams vibe can throw you off at first, It might take you a year or more to realize how strangely wondrous these six episodes are.
Maybe I just relate to the obscurity faced by anything that lives outside the pigeon holes,j.e. up on the surface where the hawks--hungry for quick cancellations--can see you. After all, the internet thrives on aggregates and common searches narrows everyone's recommended show list down to tedious specifics. A search for baking shows and all is baking shows; Horror and all is horror. But horror+baking+muppets+weird crafts? That's not exactly aggregator bait.
I don't have kids so I can't be sure, but I wonder just what level of violence and scariness parents of young kids will accept these days. I recognize the need to protect them from rapey HBO and AMC shows like Game of Thrones, Well, I bought Frank Herbert's super grisly horror novel The Rats and a scholastic book fair in the early-80s when kids weren't mollycoddled by over-parenting moms who won't let their children watch movies or read stories that have villains in them (a real thing, apparently). Here there's no villains either... at least not after they go down to the cellar. A handsome maybe-serial killer may come over for dinner but he's super sweet and kisses the muppets like he too was born for the magic off-brand indoor voice weirdness of it all. And now that it's canceled we'll never get to see what he's burying in her yard, just like we never got to see what happened to Cooper after the season 3 cliffhanger Twin Peaks back in yonder 90s. It took us 25 years to find out, he'd split into a very lucky idiot and a long-haired thug with too much bronzer,
But cult rejuvenation may ever be at hand. She has a fairly popular Youtube show now, though without muppets, as far as I can tell. At least we have these six episodes. Me, I love them when stressed out, but best I love them at 5 AM, as a sign-off from an all-night horror movie binge, coming down from something heavy, or feeling like a tuned in a channel from some bizarro world where people as cool and into cool stuff and talented and all that can get a show and make it just like them, where Netflix $$ goes to new, strange, fun unclassifiable stuff like this, something there is no category for. No row in the downward scroll where it truly belongs, instead of throwing fortunes after hack stuff just like other stuff, but with some minor tweak.
Too many original and quirky shows have died this way, but petitions by a slowly growing cult fan base brought 'em back. Maybe if you sign the one for Christine,, on change.org, you'll wreak a magic miracle. Me, I would love to get invited over for a tray of baked tarantulas and severed human fingers, but I'm the demo. I watch the Great British Baking Show, to fall asleep or de-stress and I was in love with Morticia Addams as a kid, aspired to be Gomez and hated The Muensters and their middle class values. I always dreamed Wednesday and Pugsley would kill that little Eddie, And I grew up to the muppets like every other 70s kid. In short, I am still punk rock, old school, Gen-X, from the mid-8os, when punk was a big tent. You could be goth, emo and hardcore at the same time, and there was no Netflix to aggregate us down. Not sure what that has to do with the show, but the must be a reason. Maybe just that it deserved to live. It could have brought us all together like Halloween enveloping Thanksgiving with amoeba deftness. And now that it's a chill October afternoon, a tray of painstakingly realistic and delicious skeleton finger cookies and a steaming cup of strange tea would be a very good thing,