November reality TV: shows I’m excited about—and the ones I’m skipping

Not every November reality TV show premiere deserves your time, so let me help by highlighting some must-watches and gonna-skips.

Transcript

A wave of new reality TV shows and of change here in the US as we approach the end of the year today on Made from Humans: How Reality Becomes TV.
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I’m your host, Andy Dehnart, the creator of Reality Blurred and a writer who believes in the power of true stories.
November means the start of holiday reality TV, and I’m highlighting what to watch and what to skip this month, and maybe a couple shows into next month as well.
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Hello, and welcome this glorious fall Wednesday morning here in Florida, where we are looking despondently at the rest of the country and saying, why, all of you and not us? But I say that only in just because there was wild success here in Florida as well, even though we elected some pretty dumb, corrupt idiots to statewide and national offices. Angie Nixon, our candidate for Senate, had an incredible amount of success. Just having been essentially ignored by the Democratic Party establishment and pundits and the media and everyone else.
And I say that to bring up the fact that it’s her work in communities and with people on the ground level, which she’s been doing for years and years, enabled her success, and I think really pushed so many Florida races farther into this blue wave than they would have otherwise without her there. So You know, really, like, politics is often turned into like two parties versus each other, or whatever the media is characterizing it as today.
But it’s a good reminder that it’s ultimately just people doing work and talking to other people and connecting with them about what matters to them. And I think you see no better example of that. Than Angie Nixon, though so many other great examples across the country.
So I’m just kind of excited about that personally. And also, just as a little podcast note, I was going to record last night, Tuesday night, and although I had no plans to turn on any cable news to watch coverage, I found myself doom scrolling and anxious watching uh checking into social media anyway. So my plan, you know Half failed, half succeeded.
And my other plan was to record this episode to distract myself, and I didn’t do that either. So that’s why you’re getting this on Wednesday morning. And on this Wednesday morning, it is November 4th, but we are well, not but, we are in the start of a new month.
And even though it’s four days in. I am going to run through some shows to look out for, maybe schedule on your DVR, look to add to your calendars if they’re that exciting. And also point out some ones that maybe you could just go ahead and skip, and we’ll talk about why that is as well.
So that is in our new department, Coming Attractions, where I filter through the calendar and tell you what to watch out for. So it’s November. We obviously just left Halloween season.
And I think, as I mentioned before, or I’ve been just telling everyone who will listen. Going into a store and discovering Little Debbie’s Christmas tree cakes on display a week before Halloween. Suggested to me that Christmas was already here, and I refuse to believe that until after Halloween has passed.
But it has, and so now we have Christmas and holiday themed reality TV shows that started on Monday with Holiday Baking Championship on Food Network, which is a reliable show. They’ve changed the format. In the past few years, and doing kind of team-based competitions, which I’m not as much of a fan of as the other ones.
At the same time, though, they’ve also kind of like backed away from some of the like stuntier stuff, like the mid-challenge twist that everyone always knew was coming. You know, it’s good background TV. It’s not the Great British Bake-Off, but it’s also a pretty reliable standby.
And Jesse Palmer as a host is pretty great, as are the other baking championship hosts across the year. I am far more looking forward, however, to Sunday nights. What I’m really looking forward to on Food Network this week is Sunday night and the premiere of Tournament of Champions: All-Star Christmas.
This is season two of that series. And it’s a spin-off of Tournament of Champions, the once-a-year bracketed competition on Food Network. And last year they brought together People from the show and who had been on it before, and some who have not to compete together.
And that was the fun twist of this: is that The teams are two people, and one person does a savory dish, and one person does a sweet dish based on whatever comes up on the randomizer. I was a little surprised that they were not actually having to make dishes that paired well together last year. So I’m curious if they’ll change that for this season.
But the pears look really fun. And although half of the chefs and bakers and pastry chefs who are coming back for All-Star Christmas are people who We’re on last season, none of them are paired with the same person they were before. So we get all new teams, which is exciting.
And I’d say it just has kind of a little more festive and fun approach than Tournament of Champions, which is a little more intense, and I like that intensity. And I will also say it’s not that TOC All Star Christmas is not intense. So Also in the holiday cooking competition space, we have Beat Bobby Flay Holiday Throwdown.
That is coming up and premiering on November 17th and will air Tuesdays at eight o’clock. It is the best version of Beat Bobby Flay, as far as I’m concerned, because it expands the time to one hour. And also, the number of people cooking as a result of that, but in a really fun twist on the format where two chefs come in, face off, and then the winner of that faces a third chef, while the loser joins the judging panel with whatever whoever the other judge slash co-host is for that episode. And then the winner of that second battle faces off against Bobby Flay, but picks one of the people who’ve just lost to go with to be with them as a team. And then Bobby takes the other person.
So it’s two versus two at the end there. So basically, everyone kind of gets a chance to keep doing things. It’s not just like beat Bobby Flay where You know, one person gets totally demolished in the first round and disappears, and you never hear or see from them again.
It’s just a lot of fun. This year, however, they are changing the format a little bit. So I’m curious to see how this will work and a little nervous about it, I would say.
Bobby Flay is going to be facing off against Brooke Williamson, who is a chef you know from winning Tournament of Champions and Top Chef and all kinds of other shows and competitions. And is now also in a relationship with Bobby Flay. And so they are going to have a quote unquote girls versus guys battle.
Those people are Antonia LaFaso and Ayesha from, oh my gosh, I’m blanking on the other Bobby Flay show already. the underground battle one where everyone’s always anxious about whether they’re going to win or lose as if they’re going to be you know fired if they lose. Why am I forgetting? Anyway…I’ll think of it.
Antonia and Ayesha, and then Bobby is going to team up with Michael Voltaggio and Michael Jenkins, and then there will be additional guests on top of that. I’m not sure I love the kind of like versus thing for an entire season, especially since some other shows have that format.
So we’ll see how it goes. I hope it can retain the festive cheer and fun that the previous seasons have. There’s also a new season of Next Level Baker on Fox starting November 19th.
And that is the place that if you were looking to see Carla Hall on a reality TV show cooking competition this holiday season. That is where you will find her because she is back there instead of on Food Network. I’m not a huge fan of the Next Level Baker format, and I’m definitely over Gordon Ramsay in all of his forms, even the nice version.
So. It’s not a show for me, but Carla Hall is there if you want to see her and/or you enjoy that format. And then finally, I will leave cooking shows behind with the Great British Bake Off: Holiday edition, which arrives on Netflix.
November 23rd, a Monday. The kind of weird part, interesting part, just part of that, notable part, I guess, is that we get the holiday specials for Bake Off. The year after they have aired.
So in the UK, they get a Christmas special and a New Year’s special. And those were filmed alongside the previous season’s Great British Bake Off, which means Prue Leith will be back for these two special episodes.
And then Nigella Lawson will obviously be featured in the Christmas and Year specials. Those in the UK will see this year, and those of us in the US and elsewhere will see next year. So that’s Bake Off: Holidays.
Okay, on to some competition shows, my favorite. We have the return of the Circle, and that is coming on November 17th, and it will air three nights in a row: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, which is already kind of exhausting, but also maybe kind of exciting. Hulu has picked up this format and they have changed it so they will now have a celebrity cast and in.
Uh, civilian cast, kind of like the first season of The Traitors in the U.S. I am this is one of those where I’m like hesitant. I’m not recommending it, uh, but I guess watch for my review. Watch to see what other people are saying if you’re not quite sure.
If you’re a fan of The Circle probably worth checking out to see how they’ve adapted the format. If you haven’t heard of it before, I guess I’ll just say that the format is essentially people living in apartments all by themselves and talking to all the other contestants via their computers—in which they like do voice to text basically.
And so they’re chatting with and doing challenges with and meeting with people through that interface. And that means all the people can disguise their identity or lie in various ways.
So you’d never really know who you are competing against. Are they actually the person that they say they are, for example? So I’m guessing there’ll be some interesting twists with the celebrity part of this, or quote unquote celebrity, I should say.
But a cautious curiosity for the circle’s return on Hulu. We have the new season of The Traitors: Australia, which got rebooted after being abandoned for a few years, and that will be coming to Peacock on Friday, November 20th, the day after Traitors: New Blood ends. It’s a miserable run.
So I’m looking forward to that, if only because I would love a new season of the Traitors that’s not new blood because it has not been the best of seasons. And from all accounts that I’ve seen online while trying to avoid every possible spoiler, the Traitors: Australia is or has been a good season. So excited to see that.
Next up in competitions, we have Win the Maul on Netflix. Now, this is a show that I will definitely review, and I have not yet seen, so I’m not sure. If it works or not, it’s a group a team competition that takes place in an actual mall where they basically compete to win stores.
Not really like it’s not like they get to keep the B. Dalton bookseller or the Hickory Farms, if they win that competition, it’s just like sort of how they’re, I guess, breaking down wins is by you’re winning these storefronts.
There’s also some kind of social element and alliances and competition, and there’s a million dollars on the line.
So, Netflix, for me, has some terrific, wonderful competitions like Million Dollar Secret and others that just completely fall flat like the Willy Wonka disaster that just aired this fall. So I am cautiously optimistic about this one as well, and we’ll review it and let you know what to think. But if you’re ready to see a mall-based show, November 18th is the day that will drop on Netflix.
In the other spaces of competitions and, or sorry, not competitions, I guess that is competitions for attention, the shows that are a little bit more soap opera-y.
The big news for November is the premiere of Southern Charm on Bravo. That’s on November 12th. And stay tuned to Reality Blurred because we will have Coverage of that for the first time, and I’m excited to announce that pretty soon.
And also, we have a new spinoff of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives called The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, colon Orange County. That will be on Hulu, also dropping on November 12th, a Thursday. Basically, Hulu is trying to spin this into a franchise like The Real Housewives.
And of course, the original Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is not doing too well because of the people they cast and the things that they have done. And it’s basically fallen apart in this current season, which aired a few episodes and then stopped. So We’ll see how this one goes.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the original go away entirely. Maybe they’ll try to do other cities as well, but that’s something to. You know, keep an eye on if you love those kinds of shows, but I probably won’t be watching, just kind of over it.
As a franchise, and I have plenty of Real Housewives who are giving me joy this season, like New York and Salt Lake City. Okay, to pivot a little bit, we have a PBS series that will air across four nights called Crime and Punishment in America. This is a Ken Burns-produced Epic historical look at a topic, and in this case, it is criminal justice, all the way from colonial times until today.
You know, doing the grand sweeping history perspective, looking at everything. I won’t say that I’m excited to see this show, but I’m glad we will have it. as both historical record and a packaged version of history that is more entertaining than perhaps just reading the Wikipedia articles or history textbooks.
Okay, so those are the really big shows. And I want to just kind of like touch through a few more that are arriving. Not to say these aren’t big as well, but just maybe like a second tier for me.
Although I’m going to second guess that right now when I say coming up on Tuesday, November 10th is the devil’s plan, the next season of what was a really amazing show in its first season that I really liked as a competition. Just super smart. Really challenging intellectual gameplay.
And in season two, I didn’t like it as much. I don’t even think I made it through the whole thing. They call it the quote “ultimate game of smarts.”
I think that is absolutely true. It requires a lot of paying attention to, so it is not background TV. Also, coming up, and you know, in maybe like half background TV, half not, is a new season of.
Sweet Deceit, which is the competition on Food Network hosted by Josh Peck, where teams of three people try to figure out if objects are cake or chocolate. Or actual objects. And they do that by biting into them.
So it’s like, is that a lamp made of chocolate or metal? And they put their teeth on it to find out. It’s one of those where you can kind of like keep it on in the background and look up and watch the display right there.
Here’s all the stuff, and then here’s them biting to see if they’re right or wrong. That is the part that is the most fun, and also it moves quickly. It’s 30 minutes long, and you get to see some really cool craft on display from the people who have constructed this.
These materials, these, yeah, just like they look like real-life objects, even though they’re made out of edible materials. So that’s Sweet to Seat on Food Network starting November 16th. And It’s all holiday-themed for the new season.
They just finished a Halloween spooky season-themed series, uh, season. Oh my gosh, I’m starting to say “series,” like I’m British. But Sweet Deceit will be coming up with more episodes Christmas-themed.
As promised at the beginning, I’m also going to mention a few shows that I think you should skip entirely and not bother with at all. The first of those premieres tonight, also on Food Network. They do a lot this November, obviously.
And it’s Harry Potter Wizards of Baking Season 3. As I wrote in my guide, don’t watch this show, its existence actively harms people. And that’s because it’s one where the creator of this intellectual property uses some of her money to fund Anti-trans initiatives and hurt trans people.
And there’s just no reason for that, for sure. And there’s definitely no reason for this show. And I hope it goes away and dies.
It kind of actually is dying, to be honest. This is season three. The conceit of the first two seasons was that these baking competitions were held on the actual sets from the films at the sort of theme park.
Complex visitor center studio tour attraction in, outside of London. And for season three, they didn’t have the budget to film there, so they filmed in Canada in a studio. And also lost the two judges they had before, including Carla Hall.
But the Weasley brothers are back to host, and I guess there is nothing they won’t do for money, including wander around the Traitor’s castle or do more for their, uh, Harry Potter overlords. So that’s a skip for sure.
Also, a big-time skip for me is a show that I talked about recently, which is Bravo’s new Small Town Trouble Texas that comes out on November 18th and stars that awful Aaryn, who spewed bigotry nonstop on Big Brother when she was on, and for some reason Bravo thought they should cast her for this series.
If we give the show attention, it will continue and if we don’t, it will go away. And I’m hoping for the go-away part. So that’s coming up later in November.
Also in the probably skip to not give attention is Investigation Discovery’s Andrew Tate: Toxic Empire, which could possibly be something that has value depending upon how they approach it. But I’m not thrilled with the way that ID is characterizing it. And I’ll quote here: “Tracks Andrew’s meteoric rise as an influencer and examines the allegations of predatory business endeavors that funded the global empire he created with his brother.”
That’s a lot of work to really like kind of prop him up there. And allegations of predatory business endeavors is not how I would describe the allegations against the Tate brothers, which I’m not going to discuss right now.
So, not, I think that this, even though it’s titled Toxic Empire, I’m—it sounds a little bit too much like they’re going to be making him seem like a success in some ways. And I don’t know if anyone needs to see that.
So that’s what’s coming up in November to look forward to to completely skip or to check out if you’re curious, and of course, follow along on Reality Blurred and here as I will share my thoughts about the shows that I don’t know anything about at this point and am curious to check out.
Also, you can find I will link this in the show notes, and it’s linked on Reality Blurred every page in the menu, the fall premiere guide, where I update constantly with new shows. Networks and studios and streamers tend to announce shows Much closer to premiere than they used to. So sometimes it can be a week or even the day of, we’ll find out that there’s a new season usually of a show.
So I update that constantly. And so there might be things that are popping up that I don’t yet know about as of this recording.
Okay, on to recommendations, where I share things that are bringing joy and entertainment into my life.
And today it is joy and entertainment in the form of Taskmaster, the show from the UK. I’m relatively new to the series and to watching and absolutely loving it. If you’re not familiar with it, like I wasn’t for a long time.
It is a show where five comedians complete compete, complete or compete, and both in a series of tasks that challenge them creatively, intellectually, and also just You know, to see if they can do lateral thinking. Like, can they think around the description of the task itself? So, sometimes those are very artistic, sometimes they are absolutely just ridiculous and fun.
And there’s just a wide range of challenges that they’re given. And watching them think their way through them, think their way out of them, and or approach them with creativity and great joy and humor is joyful and so fun.
I love it so much. And between the segments where we see them competing and completing these tasks. They’re in a studio with the titular Taskmaster himself, Greg Davis, and also his assistant, Alex Horn, who’s actually the person who created the show and also creates all of the tasks. And they comment on, critique the approaches, and that’s just a lot of fun, too, especially when the panelists, the comedians, start to give each other shit and or get into debates about the scoring, which is one of those things that’s totally ridiculous and not you know I shouldn’t say the scoring is ridiculous.
Greg tries to score—it seems like he’s scoring most of the time with some degree of applying criteria, but also the scores don’t matter at all. This is not a competition where the winner matters.
But I love just watching the dynamics there and the jokes and the improvisation that all the comedians come up with. I will say season 22, which is ending tomorrow, November 5th, is not as strong as season 21, which you can watch also on Hulu or on YouTube.
We watched it on Hulu to skip the ads. So Season 22’s cast has a breakout star in Chloe Petts, who is a comedian who I didn’t know, and they are absolutely hilarious, so competitive, and also just so funny with quips and reactions and just righteous indignation at other people’s scores. I’m, you know, the other people have just not really gelled in the same way.
Matt Lucas is a little—you know, sometimes good, sometimes not. Overall, Nina Conti, I love seeing clips of her comedy online, but has kind of been doing the same thing in every Task. And then Richard Ayoade is the person who this season is kind of like over it and kind of like disinterested in all the tasks. That has not really worked. It just kind of falls flat for me. He really did pop and do a really amazing job in the most recent episode, though, so. I think maybe he’s either warming up to it or I’m warming up to him, and he’s given us some really fun moments in the studio.
So it hasn’t been a complete wash of a season, but last season with Kumail Nanjiani: he was hilarious. Amy Gledhill, Joanna Page, amazing. And then also Joel Dommett, who I hadn’t known his work before. Completely amazing, hilarious, and just so joyful and childlike in the way he approached all the tasks. Just a delight. And then also Armando Iannucci, who created shows like Veep and kind of has that Richard Ayoade role of like kind of looking like he’s over it and doesn’t really want to try in some of these, but he eventually kind of gets over that.
So It’s not like uh, it’s not the same, you know, lack of energy that I was just complaining about. Anyway, Taskmaster is fantastic. I’m so excited to go back and watch 20 previous seasons after 22 and 21.
So, highly recommend it. And I should say again that it is all free to watch on YouTube. So wherever you are, you do not have to pay for a streaming service or use a VPN or fly to the UK to see it. It’s all here for you.
Okay, finally today is Life Advice from TV, and that’s going to be coming to us from Taskmaster host Greg himself, along with Chloe Petts. First, though, thank you so much for joining me today.
If you’re not already subscribed in your podcast app, please hit that button now. And if you are subscribed hit that review button and tap some stars, like five of them, if that’s how you feel. And if it’s not, go ahead and skip that part for today.
Our theme song is Cheery Monday by Kevin McLeod, and this episode is by me, Andy Dehnart, and is copyright 2026 by Reality Blurred LLC, which is also me. You can find me at realityblurred.com and andydehnart.com.
And you can find Greg and Chloe’s advice for either frugality or expanding your palette right here.
[begin clip]
[audience applause and laughter]
Greg: It’s a very grand statement, I’ll eat anything. Would you eat anything?
Chloe: Greg, I feel like we have this in common.
Greg: What do you mean?
Chloe: You accidentally drop a muffin in a bin. What are you doing?
Greg: I’d have to assess the contents of the bin, but nine times out of ten, that muffin’s coming to daddy.
Chloe: Ten times out of ten, that muffin’s coming to this daddy.
[laughter]