‘Blown Away’ should be your next Netflix binge-watch
I’m not one for reality competition shows. I haven’t actively followed one since “Survivor” when I was in high school, not counting “The Great British Baking Show” because they win a glass plate and love each other deeply. A friend recommended a new Netflix series a few months ago, but I wasn’t really interested in a show about glass blowing. When the second season dropped recently, he reiterated how great the show was and encouraged us to watch.
Holy cow. He was so right.
“Blown Away” pits glass artists against each other in the “hot shop” for a $60,000 cash prize and residency at the Corning Museum of Glass, a very prestigious glass museum in upstate New York. Each contest challenges them to create a new design from scratch, assemble it with help from Corning Museum-trained assistants and present them to the judges. Basic formula, right? That’s that I thought too, but have you ever really watched someone blow glass and make sculptures from it? It’s insane!
For one thing, the kilns they use to heat the glass, called glory holes, are heated to 2,000 degrees!
Once more for the folks in the cheap seats: that’s TWO THOUSAND DEGREES. I thought NYC in July was bad.
Like any good competition show, I immediately found my favorites and the contestants I despised. The amount of broken glass is par for the course for these artists, but every time their pieces shattered on the floor with less than an hour left, a part of me died for them.
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