ELLIOT BLOWN AWAY SKIN
ELLIOT BLOWN AWAY SERIES

Really, the most jarring thing that happens on Blown Away is when someone breaks or cracks a piece they are working on with little time left to fix it. I believe she could raise her voice if she wanted to - I am just not sure she’s actually ever done it. The primary judge, artist and professor Katherine Gray, is demanding yet super-chill in her demeanor. But Blown Away is fairly gentle in that regard. The whole point of hygge is that it’s supposed to engender feelings of coziness and contentment, something that does not align with the stress of most reality-competition shows. And in winter, you love to see that, especially when it’s below freezing outside. There’s more perspiring in Blown Away than there sometimes is in the entire first half of an NBA game. Sweat drops off the contestants’ noses and runs into their eyes. The show’s set, billed as the “largest hot shop in North America,” is filled with furnaces, torches, and other tools designed to generate sparks and smoke. Glassmaking can be soothing, but it’s also an athletic endeavor, pursued in an environment that is sweltering. While the general sensibility of Blown Away emphasizes the pressure that the artists are under to get their work completed in a brief period of time, the camera occasionally pauses to linger, almost lovingly, on some of these more hypnotic steps in the process. The artists also often roll their still-in-progress pieces through frits, bits of crumbled, hard glass that adhere to the primary surface the way kosher salt sticks to the rim of a margarita, another extremely tactile, satisfying thing to witness.

ELLIOT BLOWN AWAY SKIN

Even though I know it would scald and possibly permanently remove my skin from my body, I kind of want to bathe in a vat of scorching liquid glass when I watch Blown Away? They shape and press what look like huge globs of goo but will eventually harden into sculptures, vases, or perfume bottles. They blow - hence the name blown glass - into the punties to expand the bubbles and balloons on the other end. Contestants stretch it for several feet like it’s a huge, infinitely flexible piece of bubble gum. The things that can be done with glass, especially when it’s hot and malleable, are mesmerizing to watch. Slide on the fuzziest socks, brew the hottest tea, burrow under your favorite blanket, and turn on Blown Away.įor those not previously exposed to the world of punties (the rods used for sculpting glass) and glory holes (that’s what they call the furnaces where glass sculptures are heated - really, it’s not dirty!), there is major ASMR-adjacent action in Blown Away. What’s different is that it focuses on glassblowing, a physically demanding, primal, and tactile endeavor that most people have probably never witnessed, let alone attempted themselves.Ĭertain aspects of that process make this an inherently winter watch, which is to say it’s the sort of show that will fit seamlessly into whatever hygge routine you have established.

ELLIOT BLOWN AWAY SERIES

The series is structured like pretty much every other competition show that has ever existed: Ten contestants engage in a different challenge during each episode, with one person getting knocked out in every installment until, in the finale, a champion is named. Blown Away, whose second season arrives on Netflix today, is a winter show, always has been, and that should have been obvious to me two years ago. At the time, I characterized it as ideal summer viewing, but I was wrong. The first season of Blown Away dropped on Netflix in July of 2019.

Nao Yamamoto, generating heat in Blown Away season two.

Elliot blown away