4 comments on “LEGO Masters reality show announces teams, including some familiar faces [News]”

1. Chris Green December 22, 2019 at 3:34 am

   But they’re all adults? One of the greatest charms of this show when it was on in the UK was that every team had to have at least one child. Reconfiguring it as a show just for grown ups seems like a step backwards to me…
2. Bill McQuown December 22, 2019 at 8:56 am

   Starting out, I think it’ll be interesting with all AFOL pairs, and then, hopefully with great reviews, the show will continue into further seasons with different combinations of builders of different ages. I think all-kid teams would be interesting, too. Talent manifests at all ages.
3. Daniel Biggins December 22, 2019 at 2:38 pm

   I live in Australia, from which the US Version format was adapted (in a similar way to Masterchef, which was a more sedate UK show which was given a pumped up Reality vibe for the Aussie version before the rest of the world followed suit).
   I was initially sceptical that personal conflicts and drama would dominate along with absurd Reality tropes (15 minutes worth of material padded out to an hour long show). And whilst LEGO Masters Aus did have these aspects, it also had a real heart to it. The judge was LEGO Certified Professional Ryan McNaught who seemed to relish being in such a passionate creative environment. In fact he broke down crying the first time he had to eliminate a group because he said he’d spent his whole career trying to encourage people to be creative and love working with LEGO so this aspect of the show ran counter to his personality. The host was Hamish Blake, a geeky well-known local Comedian who has had a personal obsession with LEGO for years. I remember him telling a story of his wife paying a LEGO certified professional to make him a gift as an anniversary present, and also he said the first time he went to New York he went on a buying spree at the LEGO Store buying a lot of Expert 16+ sets “for his son” who was a newborn child at the time – something I could relate to doing with my wife before I dropped the pretence.
   The contestants were adults, but a good range too. With 8-12 hour build times for challenges it is not something I could see kids coping with from an endurance aspect. There was a kid in his late teens and his Grandma though, along with two bearded guys who worked together on an oil rig and were great Technic builders, a luvy-duvy couple who seemed to build exclusively in Friends colours, two young guys who had been building together and close friends all through childhood, along with people paired who had not met prior to the show but were individually immensely talented. One guy was a bit of an oddball, and I was concerned he would be cast through selective editing as the villain. He had trouble working in his team but was easily one of the best builders on the show. Whilst the first couple of shows did portray him as arrogant, building his part of a build and then wanting to rework his teammates half to the point of basically starting from scratch with his own idea. This was a problem quickly identified by Ryan McNaught and rather than the usual Reality Show option of driving a wedge into disagreements to create maximum drama, he counseled him on the show being about team building and his behaviour noticeably changed for the better in later episodes. It must be hard for some accomplished builders who are so engrained in working on their own builds that team building must be a big adjustment.
   It was also ratings juggernaut, outrating the mainstays of Australian Television of Masterchef, My Kitchen Rules and The Block. I noticed a large increase of people in my workplace talking about LEGO and it seemed a great show that anyone could watch and enjoy, especially family groups. They also would talk the next day about how creative the challenge was on the show the previous night; building a level in a modular apartment block that reflected your personality; building something purely for how cool it looked when you dropped it, propelled it into a wall or blew it up with pyrotechnics; building a bridge that withstands the most weight; sawing a real object in half like a television, bicycle or violin and then rebuilding the missing half in LEGO. A couple of women at my work love LEGO almost as much as me, but for the most part is was nice seeing people who previously had no interest discovering what a creative and fun medium it can be and how talented some people are with it.
4. Ty Keltner January 13, 2020 at 9:12 pm

   I see the woman in the Jessie & Kara team is listed as being from “Rogers, AK.” I believe that’s supposed to be “Rogers, AR.” There is no place in Alaska (AK) called Rogers. However, there is a Rogers in Arkansas (AR).

Comments are closed.