Stream It or Skip It: ‘Blown Away’ Season 4 on Netflix Continues Glassblowing Competition’s Hot Streak

Blown Away, Netflix’s hottest competition series, is back with a brand new season. And when we say “hot,” we mean “HOT,” surrounded by flame emojis. That’s because Blown Away is the only reality show that takes you into the hot shop to see how the glass is blown and artistic marvels are made. A sleeper hit and reliable, feel-good binge for Netflix since its debut in 2019, Blown Away Season 4 kicks the competition up a few notches with more elaborate challenges and an even bigger prize package. Now that the show is a veteran, has Blown Away lost its scrappy charm?

BLOWN AWAY SEASON 4: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We’ve got metal, we’ve got flames, we’ve got glassblowers — and we’ve got opening narration, this time from new host Hunter March. Where’s Nick Uhas? I don’t have eyes on him at the moment, but you can see him doing hot (re: temperature-wise) stuff on Instagram.

The Gist: Ten of the best glassblowers in North America compete in artistic challenges designed to push their imaginations, talents, and tolerance for heat. Each 30-minute episode includes one assignment, which the glassblowers have to pull off on-time and without breaking their potential masterpiece. The Season 4 premiere tasks the artists with showing off their signature style as well as a few of the techniques that they’ve mastered. Then the creations are judged by Katherine Gray, resident evaluator and professor at Cal State University San Bernardino, and a rotating guest judge. One glassblower is eliminated and on the show moves to a new episode, a new challenge, and another elimination.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Blown Away more or less sticks to a pattern that we’ve seen on dozens, if not hundreds of reality shows over the past 20 years. Blown Away is similar to The Great British Baking Show, especially with its drama-free modus operandi, but Blown Away’s format remains the most uncluttered in the genre. No mini-challenges, no inter-blower beefs, no last-minute challenges or face-offs — it’s all about the glass, baby,

Parting Shot: The eliminated contestant exits, and the nine remaining glassblowers are warned that the challenges are only going to get tougher.

Sleeper Star: While Blown Away tends to value skill and artistry over personality and drama, the show still manages to create the most unlikely of TV stars. It’s like how in college you were like, “That one professor is a nut,” or how you just know your aunt would be great on TV if any show would cast 60-year-olds with kooky hobbies. Blown Away is filled with glassblowers, who are textbook examples of people that you wouldn’t expect to see on TV, and Karen Willenbrink-Johnsen is both a professor and incredibly kooky. The 62-year-old superstar is literally billed as a “glass sculpting trailblazer” — the show’s words, not hers! — and she even taught some of her competitors. She’s definitely one to watch, especially as she blazes new trails as a TV star.

Memorable Dialogue: “My toddler just blew up into a million pieces.”

Our Take: Four seasons into its run, Blown Away remains one of the more wholesome and rewarding reality TV binges on Netflix. It would be very easy for the show to lean into the tropes that so often fuel “storylines” on these shows, especially after Season 2 gave us Blown Away’s take on a villain in Chris Taylor and an underdog in Cat Burns. But instead of casting for archetypes, Blown Away continues to cast people who are great glassblowers first and foremost. In fact, you learn more about the glassblowers from the art they create than anything they say in a confessional or in the hot shop. Morgan Peterson can talk about her dark humor all she wants, but we don’t get it until she makes a glass bathtub and glass toaster and calls them best friends.

I also have to applaud the show for showing restraint when it comes to who it lets into the hot shop, too. Instead of bringing in comedians or Netflix-lebrities, Blown Away brings in artists as guest judges (Brandi Clark, executive director of the Glass Art Society, appears in the premiere). That wasn’t always the case, like when ex-Queer Eye host Bobby Berk popped up as a guest judge and then hosted the show’s mini all-stars holiday season. In Season 4, Blown Away could be an hourlong Netflix competition show with lots more hot shop drama, where the glassblowers had to make gold Love Is Blind goblets out of glass as part of a challenge judged by Love Is Blind’s Lauren and Cameron. While that’s definitely a show I’d watch, I’m still glad that Blown Away remains Blown Away.

The only place I can ding Blown Away is in the host department. Usually a host shake-up is a big deal, but the switch from Nick Uhas to Hunter March feels is smooth as glass — maybe too smooth. If March didn’t plainly say, “Hey, I’m new here,” it might have taken me even longer to realize he wasn’t the same guy as before. March feels a bit more at home as a host than Uhas, who seemed a bit more timid (as I would be if I had to work around that much molten glass). And while I like that Blown Away lets the glass do all the razzling and dazzling, the show could benefit ever-so-slightly from having its own Christian Siriano or Padma Lakshmi, a superstar in the field who’s also a superstar on-camera.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Blown Away is proving to be unbreakable.