'The Great British Baking Show' Will Return In Fall 2021

Netflix is expanding its baking reality series line up ahead of the Fall season, with the streaming service's biggest hit, The Great British Baking Show, as the heart of its kitchen. Though most of the baking series on their way are decidedly un-anglophilic (Cooking with Paris is not about French food, sorry), fans of the OG reality series that helped change the genre for the better will be pleased to see it as part of the coming lineup.

As we reported in mid-July, filming for GBBO's newest season was underway in the tent once more, with Paul Hollywood, Prue Leith, and a new crop of bakers back in the bubble. Matt Lucas and Noel Fielding will once again join them. The new set of bakers has not been released yet, though that's not a surprise. Last year's cast was not announced until mid-September, two weeks before the show's U.K. premiere, and this season will likely follow that same format.

As fans who have followed the show from its early BBC days know, the new round of episodes is officially GBBO Season 12 in the U.K., but only the ninth one to arrive in the U.S. Notably, Netflix emphasized this is "Collection 9" in its press release, not Season 9. Since gaining the rights to the series, Netflix has been carefully using this terminology to mitigate the confusion of PBS's previous use of "seasons" versus the U.K. terminology "series." But the growing emphasis on clearing up the numbering of which set of seasons is another sign of just how big the series has become and that Netflix has bowed to most Americans switching to the U.K. numbering.