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How Lego Masters plays with the building blocks of reality TV
Will Arnett's unhinged energy as the host of Lego Masters has thrown me down the rabbit hole
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Like the empires of antiquity, I've seen a lot of reality competition TV shows rise and fall in my lifetime. But there's something about Lego Masters on FOX that has shaken the dust and ants off of my interest in seeing strangers compete against each other. After binging the entire fourth season in one day, I'm locked and leaned in for those bricks. Even if you consider yourself well past your reality competition show era, Lego Masters is here to shake things up and poke fun at its own subgenre.
Hosted by Will Arnett, the basic premise of Lego Masters follows a familiar formula. Twelve pairs of contestants face off against each other to create the best Lego build according to a specific theme or challenge. However, as opposed to other reality competition shows, the contestants on Lego Masters are diverse across age, gender, and other categories, highlighting the appeal of Lego for various demographics.
And the show celebrates this: season 4 featured a team of "super grandmas" named Karen and Amie who wanted to show the world that grandmas could also be serious about Lego. For millennials like me who got a lobotomy via the brain worms of hegemony from America's Next Top Model age limit of 27 in the 2000s, Lego Masters feels like a breath of fresh air. These are just people who really love building stuff.
But beyond the diversity of its contestants, the writing on Lego Masters is delightfully unhinged. There is an entire plotline in season 4 where one of the contestants, Christopher, is an evil villain masquerading as a Silicon Valley tech bro. And get this: the show is executive-produced by Brad Pitt. Yeah. When Brad Pitt isn't producing some of the most moving cinematic experiences of this century like Minari, If Beale Street Could Talk, Moonlight, Okja, and The Last Black Man in San Francisco with his production company, Plan B Entertainment, he's making a show where Will Arnett smashes Legos together on FOX. It's beautiful, life-affirming even.
And this is something that Lego Masters isn't afraid to poke fun at. In season 3, episode 1 ("Ready to Launch") the show opens with a gag where Pitt, in Lego form of course, demonstrates his duties as executive producer of the show by taking a phone call and then promptly napping. At this point, you have to wonder who this show is actually for. As the later seasons of the show evidence, Lego Masters is for more than just the brick builders of the world and the emotionally lobotomized survivors of 2000s reality competition TV. It's also built for people with knowledge of how shows are made in Hollywood.
This last piece is an element that undergirds Will Arnett's performance as the show's host. With his gravelly voice and unpredictable presence, Arnett isn't interested in being a polished host like Project Runway's Tim Gunn or Survivor's Jeff Probst. He operates the circus of Lego Masters with a meta-awareness of the show's adherence to, and rejection of, the accepted elements of reality competition TV. In season 4, episode 7 ("Brick Chic") Arnett calls out to the camera, "are you happy, FOX?! We got it, okay?!" It's one of a handful of impactful moments in season 4 where Arnett directly references his role as host of a reality show on network TV. He even jokingly compares himself to Ryan Seacrest at one point.
Reality competition shows are deeply bizarre experiences, and Lego Masters embraces this fact instead of obfuscating it. While Will Arnett's unhinged antics on Lego Masters are undoubtedly a calculated move signed off by the show's producers, there's something to be said for the fact that a network television show finds this bit worth committing to. Maybe Lego Masters is the healing salve for the hyper-constructed realities we are inundated with through our screens by perfect influencers who all look the same. It's a show that celebrates the creativity, passion, and backgrounds of its contestants.
It's hard out here, man. But at least we have Lego Masters.
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