Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Crime Scene Kitchen’ Season 2 on Fox, Where Contestants Go ‘CSI’ on A Bunch Of Dirty Dishes

Despite its kinda sensationalized name, Fox’s Crime Scene Kitchen is just a cooking competition series where the contestants need to reverse engineer a recipe based on food clues they find in a “crime scene kitchen.” From cracker crumbs to fruit peels to used appliances left in the sink, they have to determine what was made, and then recreate that thing to the best of their ability. Now in its second season, the show’s concept is a fun and clever twist on cooking competitions that relies on talented, well-cast contestants. Fortunately, the latest batch of competitors are worthy baker-detectives.

CRIME SCENE KITCHEN (SEASON 2): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Host Joel McHale leaps in front of a door, announcing “We’re back with Crime Scene Kitchen!” and then he whispers to whoever controls said door, “Please let me in.”

The Gist: On the new season of Crime Scene Kitchen, six teams of trained bakers and pastry chefs compete against six teams of self-taught home bakers to see who can solve the mystery of what was just baked in a kitchen, based on the clues (read: ingredients on the counter, small appliances that were used, and items in the trash) left behind. The teams get a brief, panicky minute or two to assess what’s in the kitchen, determine what was baked, and make a mental list of what they need to then recreate it. Based on this not-super-precise-but-close-enough forensic analysis, the teams have to pray they’re correct as host Joel McHale and the judges, Curtis Stone and Yolanda Gampp, taste their treat. The thing is, it’s not about making the most delicious dessert, it’s about determining the correct dessert, and that’s where this show veers from most other cooking competitions.

As we see in the first episode during the first challenge (one quick note, only the amateur bakers competed during this episode), where the remnants of some kind of citrus pie were left behind in the kitchen, there was only one team, two women named Cherry and Steph, who figured out that the crust crumbs were Saltines, not graham crackers, and the curd inside contained both lemon and lime, and thus they were the only ones who made the correct dessert, and Atlantic Beach Pie. (When Steph explained that she noticed the crust in the crime scene kitchen was made of Saltine crumbs, the cutaway shots to the other teams were comedy. One man was like, “Excuuuuse me?!” while most of the others had honest expressions of wonder on their faces, and that is one of the great elements of the show, when the bakers get their minds blown by their baker-detective rivals). The truth of the matter is that while their detective skills were solid, their pie kinda stunk, as it was frozen in the middle when they served it. Their competitors mostly went the Key Lime pie or lemon meringue route, and though many of them appeared to taste delicious, only Cherry and Steph were safe from elimination because they made the right thing, despite it’s technical flaws.

The pair, safe from elimination, got to sit out the next challenge, so only five teams competed to bake what most thought was either a pineapple upside-down cake or a citrus upside-down cake. The correct answer was citrus, leading one contestant named T to say, “That jar of pineapple will haunt me till the day I die.” I really do love the dramatic reactions of this cast. In the end, equally expressive contestants Donovan and Dayveon were sent home for using a buttercream frosting on their pineapple cake. I hardly knew them, but I’ll miss them.

On the next episode, we’ll get to see whether the professionally trained chefs can do any better.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The show feels like a version of The Great British Baking Show that consists only of technical challenges where the bakers are trying to piece together what they’re making and how to do it without much instruction.

Our Take: There’s a reason we all love mystery shows: it’s fun to be a citizen detective and solve something that others couldn’t. That’s a huge part of the fun with Crime Scene Kitchen: could we, the viewers at home, do a better job determining what this jumble of trash and dirty dishes became? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s interesting to see six teams trying to piece it all together and come up with six similar, but also very different, takes.

Though it’s a cooking competition, the “crime scene” component is what sells the show, and the kind of over-the-top reactions that the bakers have when they learn what they should have been making is charming and funny. These are not Top Chef-level cooks, but everyone on the show is incredibly competent and there are no villains or contestants you wouldn’t want to root for. It’s just good, dirty fun.

Parting Shot: McHale congratulates the surviving group of bakers for making it to the next round, and he tells them that they have a week off because next week’s episode will feature the professionals they’re competing against. Then he takes a delightful dig at one of his fellow Fox hosts, saying, “Good night everyone, and please enjoy whatever show Gordon Ramsay is hocking after this.”

Sleeper Star: T and Fadi are talented bakers but they’re also really funny. I’m rooting for them to stick around just for their reaction shots.

Most Pilot-y Line: “This is the crime scene kitchen, where we combine humanity’s two loves, baked goods, and criminal investigations,” McHale says at the top of the show as we get a montage-tour of the kitchens where our bakers will be working. “He’s not wrong,” I think to myself, remembering that all of my podcast downloads are variations of either The Sporkful or My Favorite Murder.

Our Call: STREAM IT! I’m often skeptical about cooking competition shows. Can the formula for them really be revamped and revitalized in a way that makes them truly original and exciting? I’m happy to say that in the case of Crime Scene Kitchen, the answer is yes. CSK is as fun to watch as ever thanks to the show’s blend of humor, “mystery” (if you want to call it that), and actual cookery.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.