When I first heard that Spike TV was putting on a furniture design competition "reality" show, it sounded horrible. Contestants would be asked to slap together a piece of furniture in just 24 hours, an insult to these folks that had spent years mastering their craft. The trailer showed them yelling, screaming and cursing at each other. There were dramatic, Michael-Bay-like wraparound camera shots of them walking through the concrete L.A. River basin. And it was reported that it would be judged by Common, an entertainer whom to my knowledge had zero furniture design experience.

But I was profiling one of the designers on the show, and felt I had to watch "Framework" for background information. So I forced myself to sit through the first episode, and the next, and the next. Then I realized something:

I liked it.

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As each episode closed I was eager to see the next. First off, Common won me over quickly; he does not try to present himself as an authority on furniture design, merely your average consumer. In the first episode the two judges with actual experience, furniture designers Nolen Niu and Brandon Gore, can be seen explaining what the appropriate heights for various furniture surfaces should be; you can see Common listening to them intently, and it becomes clear he's actually interested in learning about what they know. He's there to take it all in as much as move things along as the host.

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The challenges turned out to be fun to watch. For the first, the contestants were set loose in a boatyard with a pile of brand-new Sawzalls and Makita drills charged up and ready to go on a table. They had a limited amount of time to strip these derelict boats for whatever materials they could, and those were to be their raw materials for the furniture piece they had to build that episode. In another, they are assigned random materials, each one different than the next, and forced to improvise the unlikely elements into workable furniture against the clock.

And the time given to build turned out not to be a straight 24-hour period, but two 12-hour blocks on separate days, which at least seemed more reasonable.

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But what surprised me most about the show, is just how much certain elements of it resembled being back in school for Industrial Design. A little of that is due to having to frantically build with not enough time, and a lot of that is due to the excellent choice of judges in Nolen Niu and Brandon Gore, more on this in a moment.

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Now obviously we ID students were paying tuition and the contestants are trying to win $100,000, but once you get past the contrivances of "reality" TV, the root struggles are the same. The contestants are given the assignment, and prior to building must present their design concepts on paper to the judges. Niu and Gore are not there to entertain, and both consistently provide intelligent and insightful critiques of the concepts--while avoiding suggesting concrete solutions. It is up to the contestants to figure it out, just as our ID professors never told us precisely what to design, but were on hand to swiftly point out what would not work and where a design could fail, and we were tasked with devising our own solutions.

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Then the contestants all go into the shop and start making sawdust. After they make it through (or don't make it through) the hellish build period--which resembled my time at Pratt Studios' ID rooms so closely, it was almost uncomfortable--they must present their work to the judges, often with a still-glistening finish on it. It is here that the choice of Niu and Gore as judges shines. Both have the exact same no-nonsense, brutally honest communication style that characterized every ID crit I was ever privy to. Neither spares feelings. They are not mean for the sake of being mean, but succinct and, I feel, spot-on. They are quick to smell, and call out, bullshit; they resemble two ID professors who do not want their time wasted.

You know the rest of the formula: Whichever contestant is deemed as having built the worst piece of the group is kicked off of the island. That policy would have made design school very interesting indeed.

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As for the contestants themselves, I was again surprised. Because they seem to contain the exact same mix of personality types I recognized from design school:

- The person who can design but can't execute

- The person who can execute but can't design

- The person who can talk but can neither design nor execute

- The cocky shit-talker

- The overconfident neophyte

- The old-timer who went back to undergrad

- The out-of-it person who is clearly wasting their tuition money

- The super-competent person who can do it all and is clearly the one to beat

Et cetera.

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For the most part the judging is even-handed and fair, and there are few times where someone is sent packing when you felt they didn't really deserve it. There are a couple contestants who stayed on far longer than they should have, mostly due to luck or for being carried by someone they were forced to partner with, but by the time they get down to the final three for the finale, you feel that these three are in fact the best three contestants.

The finale, by the way, is tomorrow night.

If you haven't yet seen "Framework," you can see the previously-aired episodes on Spike TV's website, provided you log in with your cable subscriber information. [Note: At press time this log-in functionality was experiencing technical difficulties. With any luck they've got it worked out by now.] I highly recommend you watch the series from the beginning though, the finale would be a poor time to jump in.

Now having watched the entire run to date, I can say that of the final three contestants, it is clear to me who should win, though it's also not outside the realm of possibilities that if one of the other contestants pulls out a miracle, s/he may sway the judges. (I am not using names here so as to leave a spoiler-free review, for those that have not seen the show yet.) The third contestant I think does not have as much of a shot, but thus far s/he has not really shown what s/he is capable of.

The designers among you that dislike the show would probably criticize it for not spending as much time on the builds as we'd like to see. And when they do show the builds, more time is spent on what went wrong than what went right. But that is the nature of "reality" TV.

Overall, I'm urging my fellow alumni from my Pratt graduating class to watch it--you will remember what it is like to fall asleep, exhausted, in a dorm bed with sawdust between the sheets.

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