Craft Wars – Firing up the Glue Guns, Tuesday, June 26

Courtesy Discovery Networks

CRAFT WARS

Friendly Rating: All ages

Safety Rating: The judges can be a little on the mean side

Quality Rating: Could be inspiring, but less about the crafts than the trash talk

New series premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on TLC.

I get that with competition shows, especially, that it’s generally better to focus on the personalities than on what they’re actually doing. But in this case, I think that may be Craft Wars’ downfall. Hosted and produced by Tori Spelling, the show pits three crafters against each other to create stuff out of different materials, such as a sports bag out of cheerleading outfits and some sporting goods and shoes.  Or a school-room inspired playhouse out of school supplies.

Safety-wise, this is a pretty safe show, although I wouldn’t be surprised if some bleeped language pops up. However, if there was any problem it’s that the judges seem driven to be a little mean in the name of being pithy, and not only does it not work, it’s so ridiculously forced you have to wonder if someone wrote the lines for them.

There are two rounds of competition, with one of the crafters getting the boot after the first round. Fortunately, we don’t have the whole “let’s bring on 20 different people and make them all live together until we systematically eliminate folks” kind of thing going on. We’ll get new crafters each show, which is something different.

But, again, the actual downfall of the show is that we don’t get to learn much about the crafts, themselves. For example, one of the crafters decoupages some fabric to the walls of her playhouse, but then goes on endlessly about something called ModPage, which I’m guessing is the glue product she’s using, but I had no idea. I think it would have been interesting to get even a brief description of what the stuff is and what’s it’s used for.

The fun thing about the show is that it could be inspiring to think about how you can take various and sundry things around your house and re-make them into useful, fun items, which would make it a fun family kind of show. And the competition part might go a long ways toward getting your kids to watch.