Early Seasons of ‘The Great British Baking Show’ Leaving Netflix in January 2022

Fans of The Great British Baking Show have more bad news. Netflix will no longer be able to stream the separate title The Great British Baking Show: The Beginning. However, some earlier episodes of The Great British Baking Show will still be available on Netflix US. Here’s what you need to know.

Netflix’s naming conventions of the series is confusing, particularly if you’re going and looking through the Wikipedia seasons. Netflix names its seasons collections. The flagship series begins with collection 1, which in reality is season 5.

The Beginnings on Netflix covered the earlier season but as we’ve mentioned, that too is leaving Netflix on January 1st, 2022.

With that said, let’s take a look at what early seasons are scheduled to leave Netflix. As the notice you see when you first start watching these titles shows, the removal takes effect on the 1st of February 2022. This means that this is your final chance to view all the titles.

Here’s what collections of The Great British Baking Show are leaving Netflix on January 1st, 2022:

• The 2014 airing of Collection 1 (Series 5), was in 2014.
• The 2013 airing of Collection 2 (Series 4), was in 2013.
• The 2015 airing of Collection 3 (Series 6), was in 2015.
• The 2016 airing of Collection 4 (Series 7), was in 2016.

The Great British Baking Show

These seasons are leaving, but not the next. Well, if you boot them up on your Netflix account you’ll notice all come with the PBS intro and not the Netflix intro. You may remember that Netflix acquired the US exclusive rights starting at collection 5. The rights to these earlier seasons were exclusive to Netflix, and now it seems that the time has come.

You’ll notice that all these seasons leaving are the years prior to the show moving from the BBC in the UK over to Channel 4. It is notable that Mary Berry was not a judge in the Channel 4 years. Also, Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc were replaced as hosts.

It is not clear where these older seasons will be streamed next. The logical home would be PBS but we don’t yet have confirmation.

How will Netflixers be affected by the loss of earlier seasons? In the US, you’ll have collections 5 through 9 (season 7 through 12) still available which brings you right up to date. You’ve recently had season 4 of The Great British Baking Show: Holidays which were the two episodes broadcast in 2020. This year, there will be more Christmas episodes.

Of course, if you’re outside of the United States none of this applies to you as Netflix only carries the show in the US.

Notable: Thanks to Twitter user @merryismeredith for alerting us to the early-season removals.