Summary
It’s back and it’s much the same as ever – will Blown Away Season 2 prove as inexplicably divisive as the first? Probably!
In some ways, a show like Blown Away is only really possible with a platform like Netflix. You kind of need an algorithm to market a reality competition about glassblowing, since nobody – at least nobody I’ve spoken to, many of whom loved the mega-popular first season – even knew that they might like glassblowing before they watched back in 2019. As it turns out, many more people liked glassblowing than you might think, and plenty of those people liked it enough to get perplexingly wound-up about the finale, with several commenters declaring the whole thing liberal feminist propaganda.
Well, like the best kinds of feminist propaganda, Blown Away just won’t go away, and thus we have a much-anticipated second season, now streaming on Netflix. It’s much the same thing. Ten competitors face off across 30-minute episodes – each with a single challenge – while host Nick Uhas makes jokes and evaluator Katherine Gray gives tepid critiques. There’s sixty grand in a “prize package” to play for, which is hilariously thrifty by reality-TV standards, and seems a bit of a slap in the face when you consider the sheer quality of artwork on display here. It all moves along at a rapid-fire clip with a likable looseness in tone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it springs to mind.
But at the same time, if it ain’t changed, why re-review it? Well, for advertising revenue, obviously, and because a part of me simply cannot wait for people to be up in arms about the eventual winner. But beyond that, there’s little reason. With such brief episode runtimes, and such a focus on the artistic output, there’s little chance to really get to know the contestants, and the editing can sometimes work to obscure the glassblowing process. Blown Away Season 2 is, like the freshman outing, all about the climax – not an uncommon problem, obviously.
