If you're looking for the perfect series to watch for Halloween and wow your guests at your annual fancy dress party, The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell is the program for you. Netflix has decided to think outside the box by revolutionizing cooking shows with the help of Christine McConnell. The series offers a total immersion in the strange world of the queen of hyper realistic and scary cakes.
The series takes up the basics of cooking shows by presenting recipes, but the resemblance ends there! The video-on-demand platform and the pastry chef have created their own genre by mixing intrigue, sarcastic humor, puppets and very elaborate sets. We are far from the ultra-bright and modern studio.
With Christine McConnell, you enter a disturbing mansion filled with curious and awful beasts, but also very endearing who play the screen partners of the presenter. She is accompanied by Rose, a raccoon brought back to life like Frankenstein or Rankle, a mummified cat. The puppets deliver funny and particularly funny scenes as they constantly bicker under the benevolent eye of Christine.
A reminder of Tim Burton's gothic universe
We also see throughout the season the star of burlesque, Dita Von Teese who plays a ghost locked in a mirror. As for Christine, the young woman sports a chic housewife look of the 50s, which totally denotes the setting straight from Tim Burton's films that we see throughout the series. She plays on this duality that makes the episodes so exciting.
The most fascinating thing about this season is Christine McConnell's talent: she is able to reproduce her own cake mansion in a very realistic way, but also spiders and bones larger than life!The magic of her universe operates when she realizes her creations. We leave the sphere of the kitchen to enter that of art.
This is the intelligence of this series: it borrows all the interesting elements and codes of the kitchen such as the wide and worked shots on the sweet creations, but it gets rid of the constraints. Even without being interested in the culinary world, we are immersed in a suspense story where we follow Christine's daily life, in turn, with her crazy cousin who tries to murder her or with Norman, her new psychopathic lover.
A renewal of the cooking show
All the situations she encounters allow to introduce new recipes improbable and incredible. The cooking show is mixed with a storyline that creates a kind of expectation to know the rest of the adventures. However, Christine not only bakes, she also teaches us how to make candles and sew. With her, everything appears to be disconcertingly simple!
The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell is a gem of design and production. It is the world of the pastry chef that makes the series so attractive. She totally mixes genres with an unusual ease to create her own trademark. The series fulfills all seasonal expectations as Halloween approaches and makes the creepy and strange adorable. The last episode ends the season in apotheosis with the organization of a Halloween dinner and a banquet filled with incredible creations: this perfectly sums up the whole series and its atmosphere worthy of the Addams Family.
The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell also represents the idea of acceptance, as throughout the episodes, Christine seems to be a gentle and tolerant mother figure. She accepts into her house these creatures that no one wants and claims her weird side. By exposing her universe, she inspires and invites her viewers to do the same. Through this innovative cooking show, we find a new universe for people who claim their unique and bizarre character.
