Season four of Lego Masters is set to return Easter Monday, April 18 at 7.30pm ton Channel Nine and 9Now. The show is back with an array of new competition twists, mind-bending new challenges, a new “Power Brick”, and a brand-new shiny set.
Joining Hamish Blake and Brickman will be 16 of the country’s best Lego builders competing for the title of Australia’s next Lego Master and the prize of $100,000.
Mediaweek spoke to Lego Masters EP David McDonald about season four and what makes the show resonate with audiences.
Heading into season four, McDonald says that there is one major lesson they’ve learned from the last three seasons.
“It sounds silly, but probably the thing we’ve learned the most is to test the challenges beforehand. Make sure they’re doable, make sure you know if it’s going to pivot to A, B, or C.
“Not all of it is just building Lego, so it’s about making sure that we’ve actually done enough testing behind the scenes and the team are right across it before we do it.”
McDonald says that this particular lesson has been learned through trial and error.
“If you remember back to series one, there was something that we did and they all beat us, so we had to really think on our feet. Luckily, the show was still new, and that just became part of the circus. It became one of the most popular episodes, when really we were making it all up as we went along because it didn’t quite go to plan.”
Hamish Blake and Brickman
The challenge McDonald is talking about was The Bridge, where contestants were asked to build a bridge that could hold a toy truck loaded with 8kgs. The competitors were seriously underestimated however, and piles and piles of kettlebells had to be sourced to make sure a result could be reached.
In good news for viewers, McDonald says The Bridge is back in season four.
“There were two challenges from series one and series two where we were applying the forces of nature to builds. They were both very successful, they both were really fun – and funny. We combined The Bridge with The Shaking Tower from series two and put them together, and it’s pretty spectacular.
“It’s one of the ethoses that we have when we’re putting challenges together: what can we do on TV that you can’t do at home? That’s the fun of it. Kids can smash their Lego up at home if they want, but I don’t think they can do this.”
The other new addition that season four is bringing is outdoor challenges. McDonald says that these in particular have been a long time coming.
“Everything happens for a reason. We were going to do a challenge outside of the studio all the way back in series two, but that one got scrapped on the day and we had to do it in the studio because of the weather – it wouldn’t have worked. Then we talked about it again for series three, and we were even then going to do something for the Christmas specials, but couldn’t do it.
“So we said this year we want to do a couple of things outside, and the two that we ended up doing were much better challenges than the other ones we’d had planned. They had much better reasons to go outside and much better reasons to change it up. So I’m hoping when everyone sees it that it was worth the wait!”
There was one major hurdle that Covid threw into production’s way: a move from Melbourne to Sydney to avoid the worst of lockdowns and pandemic restrictions.
“Moving the whole production up here from Melbourne, it’s one of those things that at the height of lockdown, everything else was going on, and we’d think ‘oh, really? Are we going to do this as well?’. But it was fantastic, and it was fairly seamless, and it did give us a chance to give the set a bit of a polish a bit of a refresh.”
Aside from shifting an entire production across state borders, McDonald says they didn’t have too many other covid-related hiccups.
“We were incredibly fortunate that we didn’t lose a day. We shot to schedule and wrapped on exactly the day we were supposed to. We were really lucky that we didn’t have to shut down because anyone got sick or anything like that.”
Lego Masters season four contestants
The season three finale of Lego Masters saw 1.03m tune in for the winner announcement and 932,000 for the grand finale. McDonald says that the show resonates with audiences and draws them in because everybody knows what it’s like to play with Lego.
“If I was a 10 year old kid, and this show existed when I was a kid – are you kidding me? I was one of those kids with the buckets and buckets of Lego. My kids are adults now, but they’ve still got tonnes of the stuff.
“Everyone’s got a passing familiarity with Lego, whether you play with it as an adult or haven’t touched it since you’re a kid, you have a familiarity with it. That familiarity means that you can know what you think the limitations of it are – then you see someone do something amazing with it. I don’t think the show would work if we were making things out of balsa or clay.”