Mistur Fixit

Very interesting subject matter. Unfortunately ruined by the awful "casting". Is there something about glass blowing that requires you to be an obnoxious weirdo? I get that it's a reality show, and you need to spice it up, but what on earth makes you think I'm watching a trade crafting show to hear three out of the four priviliged women share their super original thoughts on politics, identity, and how hard it is being a woman? The job is blowing air into a lump of molten sand, that's a pretty level playing field. Maybe talk about glassblowing and save the rest for therapy. I can just imagine if the men spent any amount of their screen time ragging on the women, teaming up against the women, or cheering for "the boys" to win. There'd be a mob outside Netflix. Instead, they mostly just talk about glass-blowing and you get a chance to actually learn something. Still, I wasn't going to set myself up to be disappointed, so I spoiled the ending: and yeah, the worst person you can imagine wins. She's got some talent, no denying, and certainly deserved 4th to even 2nd place, but she spends the entire show just being a drama queen, yelling at her assistants, and spewing hate on this one dude who is clearly better than her. And to his credit, he's a complete professional the whole time, so he really doesn't deserve it. Gonna skip that finale and recommend Netflix take a page from the Forged in Fire playbook: make a show about a craft. We all know you control the "reality" in your interviews and editing, and this is the story you chose to tell. You can keep some people watching by manufacturing drama, but nobody wants to see a show about enabling sociopathic behavior. Eccentric hipsters will never be half as interesting as glassblowing (nor a quarter as interesting as they think they are). --- Season 2 edit --- Well, I believe in second chances and I have to say they did a much better job in S2 making it about blowing and not baloney. Almost all the contestants are much more bearable. Only one really seemed to think her gender made her interesting, but she was pretty harmless overall. She almost seemed out of place in a workshop full of people focused on glass (imagine) and I think/hope she was just there to check a box for the 3 people who watch the show for that nonsense. Otherwise it seems like Netflix may have actually learned from what didn't work in S1. However it didn't completely escape the stink of season one... (spoilers) Second to last episode, it's down to Cat, Elliot, and Chris. Full disclosure, I love Cat, she seems like a wonderful person who produced solid work almost every episode and deserved to win 'Best' more than she did. I also hated Chris, he was a total douche and I was looking forward to him getting his comeuppance. But I'm sorry, there's no way he deserved to lose to Cat in this episode. She literally turned in a giant wad of glass string... for her semi-finale. Chris' piece also sucked, but everyone admitted it was basically a more technical version of what Cat did: glass springs. But lo and behold, the guest judge happens to be the spiteful man-hater who stole S1, Deb. You could toss those dice a thousand times, there's no universe where Deborah is going to vote off the last female in the show, regardless of what she turned in. On a personal level, I wanted Cat to advance further than Chris, but not like this - not blatent robbery, and a sad reminder of how ugly and vindictive Deb is. All in all though, it went up a star in my book. Hopefully it keeps trending up.