'The Great British Sewing Bee' Finally Gets a Streaming Home in America

Our decade-long deprivation nightmare is about to finally be over. The Great British Sewing Bee, the third in the original trio of "Great British" reality shows from Love Productions alongside The Great British Baking Show and The Great Pottery Throw Down, is finally coming to America. Long overlooked by American streamers, even though Baking Show is still going strong on Netflix with Season 16, and Throw Down was the only breakout hit HBO Max ever managed, Sewing Bee is precisely what it says on the tin: Ten "home sewers" gather to compete (thankfully not in a tent) with one winner taking home the trophy. Despite the obvious out-of-the-box hit this would be, it took Roku to finally bring it to the U.S.

Of all the variations on the Baking Show format that have been tried both in the U.K. and in the U.S., Sewing Bee features the most obvious craft to use when cloning the original. Food and clothing go to the heart of people's basic needs, and it's an extremely rare person who has never had to prepare their own food or needed to sew a button back on a favorite piece of clothing. Also, unlike Throw Down, fabric and sewing projects are ones that can be treated as timed exercises, the same way baking challenges are, making the format of Sewing Bee much closer to Baking Show's.

However, like both Baking Show and Throw Down, Sewing Bee took a few seasons to find its sea legs, cycling through multiple hosts over ten seasons. Judge Patrick Grant is the only member of the roster to appear in all ten seasons, first with May Martin before switching to the more Edna Mode-esque Esme Young in Season 4. As for the hosts, the show initially started with BBC stalwart Claudia Winkleman (The Traitors U.K.), and is currently held by Kiell Smith-Bynoe, whose run began with Season 10.

Since Sewing Bee largely follows the same structure as Baking Show, the formula will feel very familiar to fans. The first is the "Pattern Challenge," similar to the Signature Challenge, where contestants create a garment using something Project Runway expressly forbids: a pattern. They don't practice their garment beforehand; the Pattern is a surprise. But they should have practiced reading patterns and making clothes from them without hesitation, and they should have no issues with cutting and assembly.

The middle challenge is the "Transformation Challenge," which is similar to the Technical Challenge in that contestants must improvise and rely on instinct. They go in completely blind, open their packages to find a discarded garment which they must reinvent into a completely different outfit. 

Notably, the original name was the "Alteration Challenge" for the first six seasons, as the show began running out of standard alterations and got creative, it became less strict about how the challenge could be tackled, necessitating the change.

The final challenge, which is one the sewers have practiced at home, is the "Made-To-Measure Challenge," and comes complete with a runway show where models (sometimes professional, occasionally friends and family) walk the garment for the judges. The winner of the week is awarded "Best Garment," since I guess Star Sewer sounded too hissy.

I have been yelling at BritBox and PBS for years to pick up Sewing Bee before someone else did, and I'm slightly sad to know neither of them will be the home of this hit. However, Love Productions had a goal in keeping the series back. Roku's deal secures the company something it has struggled to establish in the U.S.: The Great American Baking Show. The format has been a success in multiple other countries: The Great Canadian Baking Show, The Great Australian Bake Off, The Great Irish Bake Off, The Great Kiwi Bake Off, and Bake Off Brasil all come to mind. 

The original Baking Show has been so dominant on Netflix that the American version has struggled to gain footing. ABC tried it as a holiday-themed series only to see it fail to thrive, and canceled it after three anemic seasons. Over the past couple of years, Roku has experimented with Celebrity Specials, which have done surprisingly well. With this deal, it bites the bullet, agreeing to make The Great American Baking Show Season 4 and Baking Show: Juniors for Seasons 8 and 9, plus more The Great American Baking Show Celebrity Holiday Specials, The Great American Baking Show Big Game Specials, The Great American Baking Show Celebrity Summer Specials, and adding in The Great American Baking Show Celebrity Halloween Specials.

In repayment, Roku gets every episode in the British Baking Show catalog, including the aftershow, An Extra Slice, all episodes of The Canadian Baking Show, all seasons of Throw Down that Max abandoned, and all ten seasons of The Great British Sewing Bee. To paraphrase a certain Doctor, "Just this once, y'all, everybody wins."

All episodes of The Great British Sewing Bee Seasons 1 through 10 will debut on Roku in the coming days, streaming free with ads.