The producers of “Blown Away” managed to find an array of classic reality-TV characters from within the glassblowing community. One person goes home in each episode at the end of the season, the winner earns a prize of sixty thousand dollars and a residency at the Corning Museum of Glass. At the end of each challenge, the regular judge (Katherine Gray, a coolheaded glass artist and a professor) and a guest judge evaluate the contestants’ work. Once finished, they place their work into an “annealer,” another, cooler oven that slowly returns the glass to room temperature. As they work, they “flash” the glass into what’s known as a “glory hole,” a small personal oven that keeps the glass from cooling or cracking. They then use a long iron rod called a “punty” to grab hold of the molten glass so they can manipulate it. They then add color, and pick up a glob of melted glass with a blower, which they breathe through to enlarge the material into a shape. Each contestant first has to melt a mixture of sand and minerals to a taffy-like consistency in a oven heated to more than two thousand degrees. Uhas describes the process of blowing glass using a slew of industry lingo. The show’s host, Nick Uhas, a science YouTuber and a former “Big Brother” cast member, informs the contestants that they have arrived at the “hot shop,” where they will labor to create works of stunning, breakable art.
#Blown away season 1 contestants series#
The series begins with ten experienced glassblowers arriving at a warehouse in Hamilton, Ontario. I only learned about the show because a friend of mine was travelling, and was bored enough in his hotel room to sift beyond Netflix’s usual recs and take a risk on a reality-TV competition about, of all things, the art of glassblowing. It did not recommend that I watch “Blown Away,” which premièred earlier this month.
The site’s algorithm is supposed to populate one’s dashboard with fresh offerings, but in my case it keeps offering more of the same: decades-old episodes of “Friends,” a smorgasbord of quirky cooking shows, B-plus romantic comedies, and “ Stranger Things.” Rinse and repeat. The current glut of content on streaming platforms is less a bubble than a constantly growing haystack Netflix seems to bury its own shiny gems as quickly as it churns them out.
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