Baking Impossible: The great nerdish bake-off for the engineering set

• 

  The vehicles built by contestants on Baking Impossible consist of roughly 80-90 percent edible parts, like this impressive robot made largely out of watermelon.

Structural integrity, physics, and load-bearing properties—how often do you see reality TV series that reward contestants’ careful engineering efforts? And how often do you see those creations subsequently picked apart with a fork and tasted by judges?

I’m not exactly sure how Netflix’s algorithms, the ones that pore over millions of hours of viewers’ watching habits and guess what we’ll love next, settled on the idea of combining Top Chef and Mythbusters. But as I settle into the oncoming gloom of fall and look for series to watch with non-nerds in my life, I’m convinced that new series Baking Impossible is a good idea.

Having now watched a few episodes, I can safely recommend this as one of the better nerd-fluent reality series out there—even if it’s occasionally too cheesy for its own good.