Sugar Rush Season 1 Review

Sugar Rush Season 1 is the start of Netflix's sweets based competition that follows a group of specific bakers battling it out for a cash prize. This is presented over eight episodes of about one hour in length, it's a decent offering to test it out though I would have liked more here. I'm mostly comparing against the quantity of regular cooking show competitions that have a lot of episodes releasing. That being said, it's a good testing point and hopefully there's an expansion of more casual content like this on the service. Going back to the style, it's a fast paced battle that has four groups of two competing at once.

Everything is timed and that extra time can be banked for the last round assuming they make it that far. That aspect can be somewhat awkward as longer banked time can cause an opposing team to just stand around waiting within their cooking area until the timer starts for them. Some episodes were worse for this aspect, whereas most kept the pace really going. It was also awkward that a group would start the second round only to be eliminated while they were cooking, odd. Still, for the most part it was fast paced and I appreciated how the action was always going with minimal stoppages for judging deliveries.

Sugar Rush was really well shot looking great the entire time. They presented the food beautifully and the contestants were excellent choices. They all brought high quality designs and some delicious looking treats. It was exciting to see everyone cook at the same time and occasionally on the fly swap up what they were doing due to complications. The three rounds of every episode were topped off with a glorious selection of cookies, cupcakes and splendid cakes.

I also appreciated the depth they went to in presenting how the food was created. You get to see the full process behind it and hear the creators going over various steps. The full hour of time is certainly used efficiently in that regard. The contestants were well varied with some fun with ones thrown into the mix. I found the judge combination of two regulars and a guest to be great. I can't say I liked the host, I found some of his banter annoying.

The Conclusion

Sugar Rush Season 1 presented an exciting and fast paced cooking competition that hopefully gets expanded upon in the future. The eight episodes were easy to watch with some fantastic treats being crafted throughout. There were some excellent food themes chosen with neat challenges sprinkled throughout. This kept things fresh and produced some exciting culinary results. The selection of contestants was great, they made some solid choices that were for the most part very close pairings.

The judges fit in well and the guest appearances were integrated perfectly fine. I didn't like the host, I found some parts awkward for the setup and I thought some of the discussion segments could have been put together better. Each team seemed to have a lead person for chatting with the other watching most of the time which was weird. I'd like to see more of it or other similar food based competitions in this format from Netflix.

Sugar Rush Season 1 Review at Home with Streamed Viewing

Rating Overall: 6.5