HBO Max Gives 'The Great Pottery Throw Down' A Spin
Fans of The Great British Baking Show, rejoice. There's a new reality series arriving stateside from Love Productions, a spinoff of GBBO. It's called The Great Pottery Throw Down, and it's arrived on HBO Max with three full seasons, just in time for fall.
By the time The Great British Bake Off (known here as The Great British Baking Show) reached its third season in 2012, the series was well on its way to becoming a bonafide hit for BBC Two. Success on television breed spinoffs and Love Productions, the parent company behind GBBO quickly came up with new twists on the formula. The first, 2013's The Great British Sewing Bee (which I've discussed here before), was a relatively sensible concept. Much like baking, sewing can work as a timed exercise, and there was already proof such a reality competition worked, as Project Runway was already a decade old hit by that point.
With Sewing Bee hitting well and GBBO becoming a stateside hit on PBS in 2015, another spinoff was born. But the second was a far more esoteric oddity. Looking to tap into trades seen as quintessentially British, the production studio turned to ceramics. Following Sewing Bee's model of taking over an old warehouse that sat in what once was the heart of the British industry and old school rock-and-roll soundtracks, Love Productions went to Stoke-on-Trent to film The Great Pottery Throw Down.
The new series lasted all of two seasons. As longtime fans of GBBO know, 2016 was when Love Productions and the BBC had The Great British Falling Out, and GBBO packed up its tent and moved to Channel 4 in the U.K. and from PBS to Netflix over here. Production halted on both spinoffs, and though Sewing Bee was eventually revived in 2019, and is now on Series 6 over there, The Great Pottery Throw Down was canceled in 2018. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Channel 4 decided to rescue it from the dustbin of history and HBO Max, looking for British content to complement its contract with BBC America, has brought it to American shores. (This leaves GBSB ripe for the picking up by the way. I'm looking at you, PBS!)
