Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ellen’s Next Great Designer’ On HBO Max, Where Ellen DeGeneres And Scott Foley Host A Furniture Design Competition

For Ellen’s Next Great Designer, Ellen DeGeneres and her producers have selected seven of the best furniture designers from around the country. In each episode, they’re given a challenge, which they will work on in their own workshops and ship to Los Angeles. There, host Scott Foley and fellow judges Brigette Romanek and Fernando Mastrangelo will evaluate each piece and decide which are the top pieces, and which designer should be eliminated. The winner gets $100,000.

Opening Shot: Ellen DeGeneres, against a white background, tells the camera, “Anyone who knows me, knows I love furniture.”

The Gist: The contestants are the best of the best in furniture design; many of them have been featured in Architectural Digest and Dwell, and have designed furniture for celebrities and world leaders. They are Christina Antonio, Arielle Assouline-Lichten, and Erica Sellers, all based in New York City; Alejandro Artigas in Los Angeles; Mark Grattan in New Hope, PA (though he lives in Mexico City); Paul Jeffrey in Phoenix, AZ; and Urvi Sharma in Providence, RI.

In the first episode of the six-episode competition, DeGeneres greets the designers via FaceTime and we see their surprised reactions to being selected. Then Foley tells them that Ellen is sending them a “care package.” When they all go to get it, they see a crate full of rough-cut hard woods and blocks of stone. The idea, DeGeneres says in a video message, is that they are to create a piece of furniture using materials that the first craftsmen used. They’re supposed to pick one type of wood and one type of stone, and have four days to design and build their piece. It’ll be judged on functionality, craftsmanship and aesthetics.

We see the various designers get to work. Many of them want to keep the rough edges of the wood intact and not smooth down the stones, though it leads to two designers doing cantilevered “stone jutting through wood” pieces. Urvi can’t even conceive of a design until day 2, where she comes up with one based on a game she played as a kid in India. Mark has to deal with a half-day power outage in his workshop. And Arielle has to deal with the excitement of Foley dropping by to see how she’s doing (she was a huge Felicity fan, you see).

Ellen's Next Great Designer
Photo: Jake Giles Netter/HBO Max

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Ellen’s Next Great Designer has more of a Project Runway format than a Great British Baking Show format. But the fact that the designers get to do their design and build work from home reminds us of the much-lower-budget History competition Assembly Required with Tim Allen and Richard Karn.

Our Take: Let’s leave the difficulty that DeGeneres has had over the last six months aside; we’re assuming that Ellen’s Next Great Designer was bought and produced before the news about misconduct on her talk show came to light. We’ll see Ellen on each episode, either dropping by the studio or on video messages to the designers, but it’s not like she’ll be a constant presence on this show. If you’re currently anti-Ellen, her name on the title shouldn’t dissuade you from watching.

What we see when we look at this show is money. Lots and lots of it. The production itself is well-done, with camera crews spread all over capturing the work each designer is doing in a top-shelf film style you see on shows like Great British Baking Show. But there’s also the logistics of expensive materials being shipped to different places, and different pieces of furniture shipped to LA for evaluation for each episode. Foley flies to visit at least one designer per episode. Did DeGeneres front some of this expense? Perhaps. But what we do know is that no expense was spared to give the designers every opportunity to produce the best pieces they possibly can.

That’s the aspect of this contest that we like. They’re given their choice of material, albeit within a subset of everything that’s available. They’re using their own workshops. The only thing that really limiting them is their imagination and abilities. One of the designers who did a cantilevered rock-in-wood piece, for instance, was much less precise than the other, and it shows in their final pieces.

The judging is definitely tough, especially from Mastrangelo, but Foley, an aficionado of furniture design, doesn’t spare his criticism, either. We’re not 100% sure if the designers are completely sold with Foley as a qualified judge, but he does show he knows what he’s talking about with some pointed critiques that seem to make a lot of sense.

Either way, the judging should be tough. These aren’t rookie designers; most have apprenticed with the best in the field and have risen to the top of the design game. There is a high standard required on this show, and we appreciate that standard.

Sex and Skin: Can furniture be sexy? Why not, right?

Parting Shot: The eliminated designer leaves, and the remaining six are told by Romanek that “if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, [the critiques] will only make you better.”

Sleeper Star: The first episode didn’t focus its attention on a few of the designers, but one of them, Christina Antonio, produced one of the more creative and stunning pieces with her fireplace. Hopefully we’ll find out more about her in upcoming episodes.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Foley leaves Arielle’s loft, she goes, “Bye, Noel,” referencing his Felicity character. Ugh. We did like Foley’s response: “You’re aging both of us!”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Even if you’re not a nut for furniture design, Ellen’s Next Great Designer will still make you look around your living room and envisioning the interesting pieces these designers made replacing the drab stuff you bought at Raymour & Flanigan.

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 Ellen’s Next Great Designer On HBO Max

source: nypost.com