We need to talk about Reggie
There are two shows I watch with my daughter whenever they are new. The first, DuckTales, I wrote about on Observer a couple months ago. The second is in the midst of its eighth season on the Food Network, and currently contains the best reality show contestant I have ever seen.
Reggie Strom, an Oregonian 12-year-old, is one of the frontrunners on this season of Kids Baking Championship — or at least, I’ve deemed him that. I think it’s a fair characterization, as he’s one of two contestants (of the five remaining) to not have been confronted with possible elimination (aka a bottom-two finish in a given week) through seven episodes, and he’s been the top finisher twice.
But more importantly, Reggie is absolutely hilarious. And he’s not funny in the normal “kid on TV is cutesy and tries to mug for the camera” sense. No, Reggie is the snarkiest little kid you have ever seen. These shows are generally populated with uber-polite, uber-polished children who help each other out and give hugs and say all the right things. The closest thing you get to mockery is if one contestant doesn’t like peanut butter or some nonsense and someone else marvels at that.
Reggie? Reggie is merciless. In episode 3 of this season, the baker at the next counter from him, a kid named Saleem, was struggling. They had to make “dessert impostors” — a once-a-season challenge that forces the kids to make a dessert that looks like something else, usually otherwise known as “make a blondie and carve it,” except for one kid who makes a crepe — and Saleem was asking for help. This is common; one kid is struggling with X thing, one of the other bakers helps out, and everyone goes about their business. But Reggie was having none of it. He offered one bit of advice to Saleem and he was done. At one point, Saleem asked if Reggie thought he should scrap his batter altogether, and Reggie, completely over Saleem at this point, never even looks up from what he’s doing and just says, “I don’t know, Saleem, I think you should … think about it.” And if that being in text doesn’t get across quite the lack of affect that went into it, imagine that sentence being said by a particularly annoyed robot.
Last week, tasked with making Italian rainbow cookies, Naima — the season’s youngest contestant — reached a sticking point with her batter, threw it out, and started over. Reggie came over to see what was wrong, saw that it wasn’t so much “the batter was wrong” as it was “Naima doesn’t know how the batter should look,” and we cut to an interview where he was like “I didn’t want to tell her she just threw it away for nothing, but … that’s pretty much what she did.” Again, maybe the humor doesn’t come across in text, but that’s a 12-year-old dropping heavy snark. In the moment, he showed admirable-for-him restraint and didn’t tell Naima outright that she screwed up, but man does he not have a poker face.
My wife yells at me. Like I said, we watch this with our daughter, and Reggie is … not always the best influence. I crack up at his snark, our daughter thinks it’s great, and my wife worries she’ll start snarking as well. And … I mean, yeah, that’s true. Sometimes I’m a bad father. But it’s so damn funny.
Basically, Reggie is the Statler & Waldorf of this season of the show. And he’s 12. There are three episodes left this season. Obviously, I don’t know if Reggie will win over even make it to the finale. He could get knocked out tonight. And while of course the show won’t do this, I would be totally on board with him just watching the rest of the season from the sidelines and going full Mystery Science Theater 3000 with the remaining contestants, just crapping on their ideas and mistakes with a total lack of affect. Bring him back next season, and forever into the future.
Watch Reggie tonight, and enjoy this kid being brutally hilarious to his fellow tweens. It’s glorious.