Nailed It!: is Netflix's ramshackle, disaster-prone cooking show the anti Bake Off?

If you're looking for shows about talented cooks and world-class cuisine, Netflix has plenty to choose from: Chef's Table, Cooked, Hell's Kitchen, etc. But what about the rest of us – the bewildered, talentless cooks who might struggle to pull off a Victoria sponge? The art of bad cooking has been a gap in the streaming site's catalogue – until now.

Nailed It!, a new six-episode series which premiered on Netflix this Friday, is a bit like The Great British Bake Off –  insofar as Frankenstein's Monster is a bit like Michelangelo's David. Both shows celebrate amateur bakers' attempts to create beautiful confections, but while Bake Off seeks out the most gifted, Nailed It! shines a light on the most useless.

Hosted by comedian Nicole Byer and chocolatier Jacques Torres, the show is inspired by an interest meme, in which people post images of so-called "cake fails" on the social media site Pinterest.

Its raucous, low-budget anarchy couldn't be further from the civilised calm of the Bake Off tent. In the finale of the first episode, baffled octogenarian guest judge Sylvia Weinstock shoots money at the winner from a plastic gun. In context, this seems almost normal.

Each half-hour episode sees three bakers compete to win $10,000 by recreating elaborate professional designs – often with disastrous results. The set-up might sound cruel, but there's no attempt to mock the hapless contestants. No-one is given the boot after the first round – rather, the winner is punished, by being forced to wear a sparkly gold chef's hat.

The show's ramshackle charm has made it a hit on social media, with one viewer calling it "badly edited", "cheap" and "amazing", while another compared it to a mash-up of Bake Off with the horror series Black Mirror.

 Season one of Nailed It! is available now on Netflix