Pottery Is Everywhere: TV Shows and Commercials That Prove Clay Is Having a Moment
Have you noticed? Pottery keeps showing up on your screen. It is in prestige Netflix shows, reality TV dates, beloved sitcoms, and even bank commercials. Clay is having a moment, and honestly, we get it. Here is where pottery is stealing the scene right now, and what each moment says about the craft we teach every day at our Riverside studio.
It All Started with Ghost (1990)
Every pottery moment on screen today traces back to one: Demi Moore at the wheel, Patrick Swayze behind her, "Unchained Melody" playing. Thirty-five years later, it is still the most recreated pottery moment in history, and we broke down the five best pottery scenes in movies in a separate post. But lately, pottery has jumped from the movies to everywhere else. Which brings us to modern television.
The Four Seasons (Netflix): The Pottery Shed Heard Round the World
In Tina Fey and Steve Carell's hit series, Nick builds his wife Anne a pottery she-shed and installs the kiln himself, hoping she will rediscover her creative spark. She barely touches it. Then, in one of the show's most talked-about moments, the kiln bursts into flames during their vow renewal, right as the marriage itself is going up in smoke.
We would be lying if we said we did not wince at that kiln. But here is the part of Anne's story we see all the time: someone who once loved making things, waiting for the right moment to start again. You do not need a she-shed. You need 90 minutes and a booked class. (And leave the firing to us. Our kilns are professionally maintained, which is exactly why students and members fire with us instead of at home.)
Temptation Island (Netflix): The Ghost Date Goes Reality TV
Even reality TV knows the power of the pottery wheel. A recent season of Temptation Island featured a pottery date, complete with a clay-covered, hands-on-hands moment straight out of Ghost, that immediately made the rounds on TikTok. Say what you want about reality show romance, but the producers understand something true: there is no faster way to create connection than putting two people at a wheel.
That is not a producer trick, by the way. It is just what clay does. Ask anyone who has taken our Date Night class.
Community, "Beginner Pottery": The Episode That Banned Ghost-ing
In one of the sitcom's most beloved episodes, Jeff Winger takes a beginner pottery class where the instructor has exactly one rule: no recreating the Ghost scene. Naturally, chaos follows. If you have ever worried about being the least experienced person in a pottery class, this episode is for you, because it is a whole story about learning to be okay at being a beginner.
For the record: our instructors have no such rule. Recreate away.
The Great Pottery Throw Down: The Show That Made Everyone Want a Wheel
This British competition series has quietly become one of the most heartwarming shows on television, famous for a judge so moved by contestants' work that he regularly tears up. No villains, no drama, just people making beautiful things and getting better every week. If you have binged it and thought "I want to try that," you are precisely who our beginner classes were built for.
Even the Commercials Have Gone Clay
When banks start using pottery to sell savings accounts, you know clay has fully arrived. BMO's "Pottery Class" commercial puts actor Lamorne Morris of New Girl at a pottery wheel, shaping a pot as a picture of building your savings little by little. Anyone who has pulled a cylinder up from a spinning lump of clay knows the metaphor is earned. Good pots and good savings are both built slowly, with steady hands.
Even better is the Chase Ink Business Cash commercial, which features Neil Gershgorn, the real owner of Clayroom, a working pottery studio in San Francisco. Out of every small business in America, Chase chose a pottery studio to represent the entrepreneurial dream. As a family-run pottery studio ourselves, we may be biased, but we think they chose exactly right.
Why Pottery Keeps Stealing the Scene
From a 1990 romance to this year's Netflix hits to the ads between your shows, pottery keeps showing up for one reason: it is real. Hands, clay, focus, connection. No screen can replicate it, which is exactly why screens cannot stop filming it.
Ready to get out of the audience and behind the wheel? Mud Hut Pottery Studio in Riverside, CA offers beginner pottery classes seven days a week, no experience needed, easy to reach from anywhere in the Inland Empire. Book at MudHutPotteryRiverside.as.me and make your own scene.
