The Big Brunch nixes the most annoying parts of TV cooking competitions

“I hope there’s no villain in this group, honestly. Every reality television show, there’s a villain,” judge Will Guidara announces in the premiere of The Big Brunch, the new HBO Max cooking competition focused on those portmanteau plates that occupy restaurant tables from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. each weekend. “I refuse to be the villain,” he promises.

It’s the first of several meta moments found in the series, which is created and hosted by Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy, who’s joined by a judging panel consisting of Guidara—the New York restaurateur formerly best known for owning the fine-dining juggernaut Eleven Madison Park, which occupied the top spot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List in 2017—and Sohla El-Waylly, a chef and YouTube personality that most viewers will recognize from countless Bon Appétit cooking videos, her signature bob and technical brains always a welcome presence and reliable resource in front of the camera. (The first three episodes of the show dropped on November 10, while the remaining five debut on November 17 and 24.)

Each installment of The Big Brunch is focused around a given brunch-based theme, from the obvious (hangover cures) to the reaching (“farm-to-table brunch”? Sure). Ten contestants are tasked with making two courses—a starter and a main—to satisfy the theme brief and wow the judging panel enough to earn “Best in Brunch” status that week, with the ultimate goal of scoring the competition’s $300,000 cash prize to kickstart their culinary dreams.

On paper, it sounds like your run-of-the-mill gourmet game. But together, the trio of judging personalities—as well as the contestants themselves—not only readily acknowledge but gamely gibe at the cooking-show conventions we’ve all come to know and expect from televised culinary competitions, whether that’s the professional pomp of Top Chef or the home-cook wholesomeness of The Great British Bake-Off. (Levy hosted two seasons of that tentpole’s Canuck spinoff, The Great Canadian Baking Show, on CBC.)

F-bombs are aplenty on The Big Brunch (this is HBO, after all), most frequently dropped by El-Waylly and regularly followed up by the words “delicious” or “amazing.” And Levy winkingly pokes at the fourth wall several times throughout the series, most often in response to some of the show’s more #extra production choices, including a shrill bell he dramatically dings to signal the end of a challenge or a thin partition that absurdly rolls up between the pass when the judges deliberate. (“Is someone just up there with a crank?”)

Regular viewers of reality-cooking competitions know one of the most frustrating junctures of every episode is when the hosts/judges pop by each competitor’s station for a mid-challenge check-in, regularly overstaying their welcome and wasting precious minutes while time-strapped cooks race to transform freeze-dried space food into a high-minded four-course feast or bake a 15-tier wedding cake in 27 minutes. In the first episode, when Levy makes that customary circuit around the kitchen, he’s less-than-welcomed by one busy contestant’s self-proclaimed “resting bitch face.” “Kelly did not want me around,” he informs his fellow judges. “She set her boundaries. I love somebody who’s focused,” Guidara asserts in reply.

That’s not to say The Big Brunch is all salt, no sugar. There’s still a jaunty piano theme tune, a TV star offering mid-cooking comedic relief, and a lovable band of bright-eyed, heavily-tatted competitors with big business dreams and a heart-tugging home segment to make you root for them. And Levy, in particular, imbues the series with a similar melange of sweetness and acidity that flavored his famous sitcom. But The Big Brunch is refreshing in the realism and, frankly, respect it offers to its participants.

Competitors aren’t high-stress cooking in front of a studio audience or, worse, inside of an outdoor party tent, forced to contend with the elements. Instead, they’re on a Los Angeles soundstage that’s been lovingly recast as a well-appointed commercial kitchen straight out of a Nancy Meyers dream, with an adjacent dining room and bar at which Levy, Guidara, and El-Waylly entertain themselves with Clamato-doused Bloody Marys and umbrella-festooned piña coladas until the challenge timers are up.

That’s because The Big Brunch is the rare cooking show where the main challenge is just that: to cook and cook well. There are no souped-up schemes from production—no gimmicks or gotchas, no boxes of mystery ingredients or “hey, grill this on an open flame with both hands tied behind your back while yodeling ‘Oh! Susanna!’” ratings grabs. Contestants graciously don’t have to perform the physical feat of having to haul sky-high, structurally compromised creations to the judges’ table. Like real chefs in the real world, they have a team of servers to pick up their plates at the pass and deliver them to their waiting diners.

As judges, Levy, Guidara, and El-Waylly don’t pretend to be all-seeing, all-knowing food gods. They’re quick to admit culinary blind spots (“I appreciate the number of things you’ve introduced me to,” Guidara tells one vegan chef), reveal shameful eating habits (yes, Dan Levy has eaten baked goods straight from the garbage, folks) and concede to the contestants’ expertise. (“Your chili oil is better than mine, which is upsetting,” El-Waylly gutsily confesses to one Cantonese cook.) It makes for less a judging panel and more a cheer section—they don’t want to rub in the chefs’ faces what they don’t know but give them the spotlight to showcase what they do. If they’re more naturally inclined to bake a scone than roast a carrot, great. Now, bake the best freaking scone the judges have ever had.

Even the challenge wins are without made-for-TV flourish or flamboyance. If you come “Best in Brunch,” you get to be judged first the next time, when your plate is its hottest, freshest self. It’s a deserved leg up—nothing more, nothing less. That’s what The Big Brunch is as a whole, really: a deserved leg up. These aren’t Bake-Off-style cooking enthusiasts or Nailed It disaster chefs. They’re utterly capable professionals who have a plan and a dream—they just need the financial funding and HBO Max marketing to fully realize both.

Without heaps of manufactured drama, it may sound low-stakes. But with all of the goodwill and support warming through The Big Brunch, when a chef proudly announces “I’m so excited to feed you this,” it’s hard to feel anything but excited for them, too.