Escapist TV: Moon Knight and Is It Cake?

Are you tired of watching meaningful and earnest television? Well, it's your lucky day because today I bring you two recommendations of fairly escapist fare. You can either watch a swashbuckling Marvel show that features lots of Egyptian lore, or you can watch a ridiculous Netflix competition show where people bake hyper-realistic cakes. It's a win-win. 

Moon Knight: For six episodes, you will get to watch Oscar Isaac play a man with dissociative identity disorder. When we begin, he is Steven Grant, a mild-mannered Englishman who works at the gift shop at the British Museum in London and is fascinated by Ancient Egypt. However, he keeps falling asleep and ending up in bizarre situations, and eventually realizes that he has another personality, that of Marc Bishop, an American mercenary who has made a deal with the Egyptian moon god, Khonshu, to be his avatar, and therefore assume the superhero identity of Moon Knight.

Ethan Hawke plays the baddie, Arthur Harrow, who is a cult leader that worships the goddess Ammit, and believes in a kind of precog justice where people must be killed before they can commit heinous crimes. So what follows is a tricky six episodes involving multiple identities, a whirlwind of travel, getting acquainted with an Ancient Egyptian pantheon, and teaming up with Marc's wife, Layla (played by the fabulous May Calamawy) to battle gods, humans, and monsters. And lest you think this is only a series of fights and fantasy, Episode 5 features a rather brilliant mind-bending series of twists where we explore the nature of death, reality, and existence. 

Moon Knight is quite the hodgepodge, but every episode is entertaining and fast-paced, and it offers up solid entertainment, with a dose of philosophy for the more serious-minded viewer. It's a quick binge, or perfectly good to parcel out in weekly installments if you need a more sustained hit. Plus, you know you could always stand to have more Oscar Isaac in your life right?

Is It Cake? The title tells you everything you need to know. Nine bakers have been gathered together to bake hyper-realistic cakes - these are cakes that are designed to look like actual objects, but when you approach them with a knife...they're cake. It's dumb, it's goofy, it's incredibly impressive. My boyfriend and I have a joke (OK, maybe I am more amused by it than he is) where I will just scream, "Is it tacos? No, it's cake!" because in the pilot episode, someone cut into a plate of tacos, and even though they were demonstrably cake, I still was like, "but those are tacos!"

Each episode features three bakers competing against each other so there are convoluted machinations in play to determine how bakers get picked and how we will go through the round-robin selection to ultimately crown a winner. These contestants do grow on you, and by the end of the eight episodes, there is a Great British Bake Off vibe where you can tell they have all bonded after these many hours of cheering each other on as they bake. Hosted by SNL's Mikey Day, a man who knows nothing about baking and is charmed by the word "fondant," this is a silly, fun, harmless way to spend an afternoon. Except by the end of it, you might really be craving some cake. Or tacos.