‘Making It’ a charming reminder that we are in grips of cutesiness epidemic
“MAKING It,” a crafting competition show premiering on Tuesday on NBC, is so genuinely good-hearted and adorably inventive that it’s darn near impossible to criticise. But let me at least try.
Sooner or later, American culture will need to have a strong talk with itself about adult- onset cutesiness, which started about 20 years ago, then gained hold as a comforting response to frayed 9/11 nerves and never stopped. Among other aspects of everyday life that were subsumed by cutesiness was the simple, often private act of having a hobby for making things. Hobbies got cutesified - and commodified - into a new activity called crafting.
Now is obviously not an ideal time to reckon with our addiction to all this flowers-andbirdies sweetness and clever, hipster-hacked smarm, because the world is just getting worse around us. Children are in cages, thermometers are rising, ice caps are melting. We take mental and emotional refuge wherever we can fi nd it, armed with glue guns.
In a barn at some idyllic countryside farm, eight crafters (woodworkers, paper sculptors, decorators, junk hounds, felt fiends) assemble for the “Making It” craft- off in the same structure and tone of the soothing “Great British Baking Show.”
With limited time but a relative bounty of resources and tools, the contestants are tasked with making something along a theme: a three- dimensional representation of themselves as an animal; a play space for kids; a terrarium of their hometown; a holiday-themed front porch; an inventive snack tray for a party; a wedding-cake topper, and so on.
Overseeing this are Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman, who, as the former stars of “Parks and Recreation,” need no introduction in Cutesyville. She’s a sharply funny idol to young women everywhere, unerring in her quips and worldview, perfectly willing to mock her own inability to identify basic tools; he’s a feminist grizzly with crafting bona fides, a woodworker who builds canoes and furniture and, while blindfolded, can identify wood types by their smell.
Sure, they ought to have more challenging acting work to do and better places to be, but to their credit, Poehler and Offerman make “Making It” seem like the absolute best way to fritter away the pre-apocalypse. “Let’s make a show that makes you feel good,” Poehler declares.
Celebrating an air of juvenilia along with its admiration for honed skills, contestants win scout-like patches for individual rounds - a “fast craft” opens each competition, followed by a more complicated assignment that seems to take up most of the day (“Making It” never quite explains how long these efforts really take to finish).
After six episodes, the ultimate winner will get a paltry US$ 100,000 - but, as Offerman correctly notes, “The real prize is a job well- done.”