Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Great Pottery Throw Down’ On HBO Max, Where Master Potters Compete In Making Lumps Of Clay Into Lasting Creations

The Great Pottery Throw Downis a series that aired its first two seasons on the BBC; the show moved to Channel 4 after the BBC cancelled it in 2019. All three seasons are debuting in the States on HBO Max. It’s made by Love Productions, the same company that produces the much-beloved series The Great British Baking Show. Can this show do for clay what the Bake-Off did for fondant?

THE GREAT POTTERY THROW DOWN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A grainy black-and-white shot of someone throwing a pot on a pottery wheel, with the word “INTERLUDE” on it. Then it turns color, and host Sara Cox says, “No, this isn’t the bit between the movies in the 1960s. This is The Great Pottery Throw Down.”

The Gist: In the competition, ten expert potters compete through six complex and — for the people watching them, at least — excruciating tasks. Why excruciating? Because when you work with clay, there’s a lot of waiting time. The first task, for instance, will take four days to complete: A series of five bowls that are all different sizes, designed to stack within each other. Why four days? Because after taking hours to shape and throw the bowls, waiting for them to dry a bit, then cutting and trimming the bowls, the drying and kilning process gives the potters an entire day of downtime.

Then after that, the potters have to decorate, then more kiln time. On day four is when they reveal their bowls to judges Kate Malone and Keith Brymer Jones. During any of those points, the bowls they made could crack or the color not transform as well as they hoped. During two of the drying periods, the potters do shorter challenges. In one, they have to make handles for ten mugs, using a “pulling” technique that elicits a lot of fourth-grade giggles from the potters as well as Sara. In another short challenge, the potters have to make as many tiny egg cups “off the hump” as they can, meaning they cut each cut off the hump of clay as they go instead of making them from tiny individual humps of clay.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Well, its sister show, The Great British Bake-Off, of course, but any show that’s used the Bake-Off format, from Making It! to Blown Away.

Our Take: The Bake-Off format is pretty well-proven at this point, and its success isn’t just about seeing ten people at ten tables do their thing in a quiet and understated production. The people at Love Productions make sure that the competitions they produce aren’t about nastiness or people who “aren’t here to make friends.” They’re about camaraderie and creation, about people who may do other things for a living but who really appreciate the craft and art of baking, or pottery, or whatever the show is about. And that certainly can be seen on The Great Pottery Throw Down.

The potters’ day jobs rage from interior design to veterinarian to general contractors. Some of the creations they’ve made are more towards the realm of sculptures than crockery. But the principles are the same when working with clay: “wedging,” which means getting the air bubbles out, “throwing,” shaping the clay into a bowl of cup or vase on the wheel, then “cutting and triming,” taking the rough, semi-dry crockery and smoothing it out.

But one of the great things about the Throw Down (get it?) is the same great thing about the Bake-Off: Mistakes can be fixed, they’re a part of the process, and the contestants don’t get thrown if something doesn’t turn out the way they expected. The creativity they use to cover cracks or fix problems is part of the fun; one of the contestants decided to decorate her bowls by writing each of their problems on the bottom: “Off Center,” “Wobbly Base,” and in one case, “Perfect.”

It’s that sense of “hey, I did my best, but it’s the way the clay fires,” that makes the Throw Down watchable.

Sex and Skin: Aside from the cheeky allusions to masturbation when the contestants were “pulling” their handles, it’s pretty clean.

Parting Shot: The winner of the competition won “Top Potter” for the week, and the bottom two are subject to elimination. When the person who was eliminated is interviewed, he/she says “They made the right decision.”

Sleeper Star: Keith Brymer Jones seems like a gruff judge, but he always delivers his blunt critiques with a warm smile. He even teared up when one of the contestants who was struggling came up with a fantastic design for her bowls.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT.  You can’t help but feel relaxed while watching The Great Pottery Throw Down, and it’ll be interesting to see how the ante gets upped not only during the first season, but across all of the show’s three seasons.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Great Pottery Throw Down On HBO Max