Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Duff’s Happy Fun Bake Time’ On Discovery+, Where Duff Goldman Cooks With Puppets And Talks About Food Science

Duff Goldman is the kind of personality that the Food Network loves: An outgoing, boisterous guy who doesn’t take himself or his work very seriously, even though he’s extremely good at what he does. At some point, someone there thought it would be a good idea to have Duff teach kids to cook by having him work with puppets created by the Jim Henson Company. But sometimes, good ideas don’t always get executed very well. Read on for more…

DUFF’S HAPPY FUN BAKE TIME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Duff Goldman is decorating a cake with a sloth puppet looking on. “I’m Duff, and I’m a chef,” he says.

The Gist: Duff’s Happy Fun Bake Time is a family show where Goldman, best known for the series Ace Of Cakes, cooks, bakes and talks about the science of food with four of his puppet pals. There’s a robot named Cous Cous (Donna Kimball), a sloth named S’later (Victor Yerrid), a crab named Edgar (Kenny Stevenson), a robotic elephant named Dizzy (Dorien Davies), and a growling oven named Dragon Oven. Oh, and he has a human assistant named Geoff (Geoff Manthorne).

In the first episode, Duff and his buddies make pasta. He wants to have a dinner party for some very special guests, and his puppet pals are also invited, and what does everyone like? Pasta! Not just the dry stuff from the supermarket, but homemade pasta. Duff decides to make a hearty meat sauce that’s going to work well with a pappardelle, a broad noodle with a lot of surface area. Then he also makes a pesto, which he pairs with fusilli.

How did he decide which pasta to use? Well, he and S’later go into the Proof Box (Amanda Maddock), which takes them on a tour of the history of noodles, from China to Italy to Germany (spaetzle is considered a pasta, too). Then, when Duff tells Proof Box to take them “home”, they land in his mother’s kitchen (Jacqueline Winch, Duff’s real-life mother), where she gives them a brick of her awesome noodle kugel. When they get back and decide which shapes to make, Duff teaches the puppets how to make pasta dough, spread it out, shape it and cook it. He even lets them know how to test to see if it’s done (and no, it’s not throwing it against the wall to see if it sticks).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Duff’s Happy Fun Bake Time is more or less a lower-budget version of Waffles + Mochi, but Duff doesn’t get nearly the press attention for doing a food and cooking show for kids that Michelle Obama does.

Our Take: It’s hard to drag down a kids’ show, but, boy it was hard to watch Duff’s Happy Fun Bake Time. As much as we mentioned above that the show seemed low budget, it was produced by the Jim Henson Company, who know more about creating puppet-based entertainment for kids and adults than just about anyone. But, for some reason, the different elements of this one don’t come together very well.

One of the problems is Duff himself. On his other shows, he comes off as this friendly guy who can has no problem showing his inner kid, despite being a grownup. But on this show, we see two Duffs: The funny, natural Duff that ad libs during the cooking segments and has a good time with the puppets, and the stiff Duff that looks like he’s reading cue cards during the scripted segments. It shouldn’t be that glaring of a difference, but it is.

The show concentrates a bit more on cooking than Waffles + Mochi does, but the Proof Box segment where Duff and S’later basically stand in front of a green screen and learn about the origins of the food their making was reasonably entertaining in a low-tech sort of way. But, yet again, Duff looks wholly uncomfortable trying to do scripted bits. And if he looks uncomfortable, the kids watching will pick up on that and likely reach for the remote.

The show just isn’t dynamic enough to be an effective kids’ show. Except for S’later, the puppets generally stay in one spot or maybe move laterally a little bit. The cooking segments speed through recipe details in favor of lingering overhead dump and stir shots. Kids need a little more variety and movement, especially these days, and there’s just too much about this show that is static.

What puzzles us is that the Henson folks didn’t try to make the show more visually interesting. Sure, the kitchen is colorful but there doesn’t seem to be that sense of wonder and whimsy that the Henson company is experts at creating. It looks dull, it feels dull, and its pacing is dull. And dull is even deadlier in family programming than it is in adult programming.

What Age Group Is This For?: We’re thinking kids 5 and up can watch, though the slow pacing will make the youngest viewers squirm.

Parting Shot: Duff and Geoff have their dinner party for Duff’s special guests: His puppet buddies!

Sleeper Star: Hopefully, we’ll get more glimpses of Duff’s mother as the episodes go along. We see where he gets his relaxed manner from in those scenes.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Duff and the puppets make their pappardelle noodles, it looks like they made eight of them, and Duff ate one entire noodle to test doneness. Then, in the pot, there seemed to be dozens of noodles. The magic of cooking shows, folks!

Our Call: SKIP IT. There’s just not enough going on in Duff’s Happy Fun Bake Time that kids will enjoy, especially not compared to the similarly-themed, and much more adorable, Waffles + Mochi.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Duff's Happy Fun Bake Time On Discovery+