Recap: Top Florist
So here we are, starting out a brand new season of a brand new show, and gosh are the folks who design this stuff working to get us all excited. There’s ribbons, there’s flowers, there’s an assortment of scissor-y implements, and here she is, ladies and gentlemen, Carla Bruni welcomes us to the first season of Top Florist. Because sleeping with aging rockstars and being First Lady of France leaves some room in her schedule. And she’s done having torrid affairs with philosophers. So she had some time to spend on this thing, and it was a chance to stand far enough away from her husband to wear heels. Anyway, here she is in LA to welcome us to the season, product placed prizes, Martha Stewart Living, fifty thousand dollars and the title of Top Florist.
Opening credits. Ted, Leslie, Maya, Jeffrey with a J, Jean, Geoffrey with a G, Amanda, Jimmy, Ricardo, Violet, Sam, Patricia. The dozen contestants go by really fast, and the only standouts are Violet, who looks like she is dressed to play Little Nell in Rocky Horror, and Jimmy, who looks like he is crossing a gangsta aesthetic with a Buddhist philosophy, which is an interesting look. He definitely looks like he was cast for entertainment value, not his design skills.
We return from commercial to the obligatory reality-show footage of contestants arriving in Los Angeles. A city known for its flowers. Except for how it’s not. Ted and Leslie wheel their suitcases into a high-rise condo and make admiring noises about the skyline. Leslie interviews that she’s from Kansas, and she’s not in Kansas anymore. Geoffrey with a G interviews that he loves LA and he would never live anywhere else. He moved here to go to design school when he was seventeen. He has this weird, flock-of-seagulls hairstyle that makes me want to take away his hair gel privileges. Back at the apartment, more contestants have arrived, and Maya is nervous about tomorrow, when the competition will start. In the living room, Ted and J-Jeffrey bond over the challenges of being a straight male florist. Everyone assume they’re gay all the time. This is really an industry dominated by women, and by gay guys. Ted jokes that he got into this to meet girls.
Patricia is from Connecticut. She does a lot of floral arrangements for churches. She looks a tad uncomfortable with Violet and Jimmy in the background. I sort of hope she’s rooming with Leslie. There’s a pretty big age difference between them, but “not in Kansas anymore” is unlikely to freak Patricia out.
Morning! Oh thank heavens, we can start with the actual competition.
Carla Bruni strides into the workshop, which looks much whiter than anyplace I have ever seen a florist work. I guess green and brown don’t work so well on tv. Or they got a deal on rejected Top Chef setups. Carla introduces the judges for this challenge. There’s herself, of course, and the of course allows her to completely omit her actual resume (you’d think she’d get in a plug for her duet with Harry Connick Jr., but she passes for now). Additional judges are Tanya Holnwick, editor of Martha Stewart Living, and Chad Markovitz, founder and owner of Color. Jean interviews that Chad is “legendary.” “Color is only the most amazing floral design business ever.” Chad has done floral design for basically every celebrity there is, for movies, for world leaders. (World leaders care about florists? Who knew?) Jean is really excited to be working with him. Or, she says, near him. Since he’s already said in interviews that he’s not Tim Gunn, near him is probably accurate.
Carla takes a moment to introduce this week’s guest judge - Maria Shriver. I’m sensing a theme here. The challenge is to design a table arrangement with a patriotic theme for the speaker’s table at a DNC fund-raising dinner. The winner gets immunity for the next challenge, the loser will be eliminated. Contestants have a budget of $100, an hour to shop at the LA Flower Market, and then six hours to put their arrangements together. The florists sprint to the fleet of waiting SUVs and head out.
Once there, it’s clear that there’s a major advantage to the contestants in sensible shoes. Patricia may be fifty, but she’s all over the place in her tennies, while Violet nearly sprains an ankle just getting through the door. Everyone’s running around like crazy, and we really don’t see what anyone buys. Jimmy interviews that he things that the contestants who have really had to market themselves have an advantage over the ones who can get by on church arrangements. Leslie interviews that the budget is really tight for this kind of arrangement - they’ll have to produce something about three feet by three feet, to cover the front of the table and hide wiring for microphones, and a hundred bucks is not a lot of money.
Back at the workshop, the chimes of impending judgment play for Chad, who’s doing a walk-through to see how things are going. Jimmy confesses that he doesn’t think he bought enough, and he’s worried about filling the space. Maya is worried about the patriotic theme - she prefers her arrangements to seem like organic parts of the environment. For only the eighth time this episode, I feel like explaining Los Angeles is a dessert. Unless they wind up doing arrangements in rocks and lizards, none of their materials are organic to this environment. Anyway, how are flowers ever an organic component of a banquet hall? It’s a good thing that Chad doesn’t see himself as the Tim Gunn type, because his idea of a supportive comment is “Good luck with that.”
The clock ticks down to zero, and the judges come in… Carla evidently really missed wearing heels. We barely see some of these arrangements - Jean has done something with a lot of white, and red and blue ribbons. Patricia used a lot of hydrangeas, which seems like a good way to fill the space, even if the colors seem a tad off. Jimmy has backed up his red and white streaky peonies with a lot of ferns, and the effect is sort of… hedge. It looks like Ricardo has done sort of a mountain-y thing with lots of upward spikes. His arrangement is much less red and white than most, and I’d like a longer look, but we can’t waste time on that, because we have to take a look at J-Jeffrey’s disaster. I’m not sure what flowers he used, but they’re flopping all over the place. We also get three angles on Maya’s thing. She abandoned the organic idea, she said, because politics isn’t organic anyway. Her new idea was to use a lot of foil. Amanda’s flowers look very wedding-y. G-Geoffrey has also used peonies, with delphinium accents. Leslie used a lot of crysanthemums.
Ricardo gets grilled a little - Maria wants to know if he’s aware that nearly all of his flower choices are poisonous. “It’s a great look, but these are not good choices for a political event.” Carla nods, but it turns out he’s in the top two. Leslie says she wanted her flowers to create the look of a fireworks display, and is declared the winner.
The bottom two are Maya and J-Jeffrey. Tanya likes that Maya took a risk, but the consensus is that her arrangement looked like Sputnik. J-Jeffrey explains that he hoped to be able to wire his flowers for more height, but he failed. In the end, the judges decide that Maya’s arrangement was worse: it was ugly, it missed the theme, and it failed the task. Maya is sent home.
Next week: prom corsages!