American baking is a jumble of double-crust pies, babkas and pastelitos, of red bean buns, coconut layer cakes and sourdoughs. In home kitchens along a single cul-de-sac, chocolate chip cookies may evolve with more defining characteristics than Darwin’s finches.

You might not glean this from watching Season 2 of “The Great American Baking Show,” an eight-part cooking series that had its premiere on ABC three weeks ago. Judged by the cookbook author and British television personality Mary Berry and the American pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini, the show is a spinoff of the immensely popular “The Great British Bake Off,” which is leaving for Channel 4 after seven seasons on the BBC.

This is meant to be an American edition, though much like before, amateur bakers meet in a plain white tent outside of London, surrounded by well-groomed slopes of lawn and wild rabbits sniffing clean country air. Something isn’t quite right. Familiar faces are missing, and compressing the show into a holiday themed box (by which the producers mean Christmas; they always mean Christmas) is immediately confusing. Can the definition of American baking really be limited to fruitcake and gingerbread?

The married actors Nia Vardalos and Ian Gomez share the hosting duties and recite a less cheeky version of the terrible puns baked into the DNA of the show, but they lack the onscreen charisma of Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, who brought a sweet, surreal goofiness to the role on “The Great British Bake Off.” At one point, Ms. Vardalos directs the bakers to paint a holiday picture with a three-dimensional cookie scene: “It could be Santa’s workshop, it could be an ice-skating rink with children, there are no limits!” There are limits.