LONDON — Michael Chakraverty was having a panic attack on reality TV.

He was competing in this year’s season of “The Great British Baking Show,” and his choux pastry was falling apart. “As soon as I became unwell, they removed cameras from me,” Chakraverty remembered recently. “They found ways that they could make me comfortable, rather than use it as a story line.”

What viewers saw was Chakraverty struggling with, and upset about, the technical challenge, but the panic attack itself and the way the producers and a host talked him down were not aired. The genre of reality TV is notorious for distorting events to ramp up the drama, but “The Great British Baking Show,” which is called “The Great British Bake Off” in Britain, is part of a recent trend in British reality shows to lean into sweet, comforting television.

Since “Big Brother” premiered in 2000, reality TV has been big business in Britain. Now, alongside structured reality shows about colorful social groups (“Made in Chelsea”), competition shows searching for the next big thing (“The X Factor”) and manipulative dating shows (“Love Island”), a gentler style of reality vehicle has been on the rise, delighting audiences in Britain and — increasingly — making the leap to the United States. The shows attract participants who are not fame-hungry, and they depict relatively normal people doing relatively normal things.