By Taylor Neumann
Rom-com fans, the perfect show is waiting for you on ABC (Mondays). The Baker and the Beauty is a modern-day fairy tale based off of a popular Israeli show and follows — you guessed it — a baker and a beautiful woman as they meet and fall in love. It’s Notting Hill, but in Miami!
Daniel (Victor Rasuk) is a baker at his family’s Cuban bakery, cooking up Latin specialties along with the rest of his family, including his mother and father (Lisa Vidal and Carlos Gómez), aspiring DJ brother (David Del Rio), and young sister (the charming Belissa Escobedo). When a date with his girlfriend goes horribly wrong, he ends up spending the night out on the town with Noa Hamilton (Nathalie Kelley), a famous actress going through her own breakup. From the very first moment they meet — in the bathroom! — it’s clear that the two are meant to be together.
Despite the series’ title, Noa Hamilton isn’t simply “the beauty.” “What I love about Noa is that she’s so much more than just a beautiful face,” Kelley said. “You are going to see in this series that she’s a brilliant businesswoman, very savvy. She’s a philanthropist and humanitarian. … She’s really an aspirational female character, and it’s a credit to ABC for letting us write her in such a way because this is an important time for young women to really reconsider notions of beauty and what makes somebody beautiful.”
The show is filmed in Puerto Rico, standing in for Miami, with an all-Latino cast. “One of the things that is most attractive about the show is we’ve never really seen what a Latin — specifically Cuban — family dynamic looks like,” Kelley said.
Creator Dean Georgaris also cites My Big Fat Greek Wedding as an inspiration: At its core, this romantic story is really about family.
