Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sue Perkins: Perfectly Legal’ on Netflix, Where The Ex-GBBO Host Has High Times And Misadventures In Latin America

In the three-episode Netflix docuseries Sue Perkins: Perfectly Legal, the comedian and former host of The Great British Baking Show embarks on a series of adventures across Central and South America with the sense that challenging her comfort zone might allay her fears of becoming staid and fixed in middle age. Perkins and her small crew hit Colombia and Mexico in episode one; later, Perfectly Legal will travel to Brazil and Bolivia. 

SUE PERKINS: PERFECTLY LEGAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A gun cocks, and we open with a revolver stuck in our face. Or the face of Sue Perkins, anyway. “It was at this moment,” she says in voiceover, “this precise, exact moment, when I realized that the whole thing had been a very naive, very stupid mistake.”

The Gist: In this instance, Perkins has found herself in a factory in Bogota, Colombia, the guest of a maker of tactical clothing, who performs a test on a puffy vest by firing his revolver point blank into her belly. It’s just one stop on her visit to the country, where comic and actress Liss Pereira is her designated companion. (Perkins rendezvous with a local comedian in each country she visits.) Liss and Sue also engage with the explosive Colombian pastime of tejo, where she’s amazed at the emergence of her athletic ability – well, athletic in the sense that she successfully tossed a ball filled with gunpowder at a target while knocking back shots and beers – and dance and drink the night away at a massive dance club. One thing Perfectly Legal doesn’t shy away from is showing its host blessedly sloshed.

“I don’t do danger,” Perkins says of these experiences. “I specialize in making elaborate and not entirely effective puns, mainly on baking shows.” But part of the impetus for Perfectly Legal is for the comedian and presenter to confront her middle age with a rash of reckless and fun experiences, all of them more or less accepted in the countries she’s visiting. There are chances for insight here, too. Liss and Sue tap three friends they made in the dance club to join them on a white water rafting trip outside of Bogota. Carolina, Coqueta, and Martin describe their experiences as sex workers in Colombia, an industry that’s not perfectly legal but also not largely persecuted.

After a change of scenery to the northern coastal city of Cordoba, Perkins meets comedian Ivan Marin, and the two take to the streets to test the strength of his assertion that sex with donkeys is somewhat common in the region. And later, she flies to Mexico City, where comic Alex Fernandez tries to goad the vegan Perkins into eating lengua tacos before ferrying her to the site of a Santa Muerte death cult and plunging with his guest into the explosive madness of a fireworks festival in Tultepec.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? For American audiences, the most obvious comparison here is to the travelogues of Anthony Bourdain – especially Parts Unknown – whose untimely passing left a void in that particular media niche. But Perkins herself is no stranger to the travel doc format, with BBC and Channel 4 productions like The Ganges with Sue Perkins, Japan with Sue Perkins, and Sue Perkins’ Big American Road Trip under her belt. They might make her into the next Michael Palin yet.

Our Take: As the host/chief experiencer of the activities in Perfectly Legal – from getting shit-canned in a Bogota gay club and white water rafting with sex workers, to becoming a human test dummy for an armored clothing manufacturer, being blessed by a death cult, and taking a straw poll to gauge the popularity of sex with donkeys in coastal Colombia – it helps that the comedian and former GBBO host is an engaging presence at the series’ center, always able to insert jokey asides but mostly operating from a place of humility. “Take me along,” she’s saying to the local comedians who become her tour guides. “Show me a few slices of this life.” And that’s important, her willingness to be an unknowing idiot, because it reduces the potential for Perfectly Legal to fetishize what it might characterize as exotic but what is in fact the everyday lives of so many people it encounters. Perkins is respectful of the individuals she meets; she speaks a little Spanish, and certainly seems to understand it enough that people can be themselves when speaking to her. And she also builds an instant rapport with the comics tasked with showing her around. Perfectly Legal occasionally veers into Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee territory, with Perkins and Ivan Marin exchanging comparisons between their respective countries as they road trip around Cordoba, or when she and Alex Fernandez stuff a mariachi band complete with their horns and guitars into the back of the VW microbus they’re piloting through the streets of downtown Mexico City.

Sex and Skin: Nothing other than some frank and frankly insanely casual descriptions from the men Sue and Ivan question about their predeliction for sex with a los burros.

Parting Shot: Immersed in a field full of fireworks exploding at close range, Sue Perkins offers a few thoughts about her recent experiences. “I’d come to Latin America to escape middle age,” she says in voiceover. “To avoid getting stuck. So far, I’ve been shot at, serenaded, and spat upon. But there was a line between adventurousness and recklessness.” As she freaks out inside her protective gear, amid the exploding pyrotechnics, Perkins says that on the other side of that line is danger and intoxication, and that she wants more.

Sleeper Star: There’s a recurring bit in Perfectly Legal where Perkins appears with a large map drawn out on white paper, upon which she fills in little sketches of her experiences and the people she’s met while being sure to include a few visual gags. It’s a fun, tactile means of illustrating her physical space and providing some general exposition.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I’d been in Colombia for eight hours, and I’d spent seven-and-a-half of those drinking heavily.” (It’s in these moments where Perkins’ voiceover hits most closely to Bourdain’s.) “I was in the largest gay club in Latin America, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of wildly beautiful Colombians. And I was gloriously, horribly, beautifully, disgustingly drunk. Of course, there was nothing about this I couldn’t do in London. I hadn’t learned anything about myself by getting shit-faced. But I was definitely having fun again.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. For viewers, Sue Perkins: Perfectly Legal offers a low stakes jaunt around a few unlikely corners of Latin America, with Perkins as the engaging, funny, willing, and refreshingly self-deprecating master of ceremonies.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges