Project Runway’s judges for the final competition (from left):
Nina Garcia, Michael Kors, “Posh Spice” Victoria Beckham & Heidi Klum

The time it takes to edit down the raw footage of a Project Runway show into the smooth final product creates some interesting problems for the program’s narrative. In order not to give away the secret of who the final three contestants are, the show has had to let a fourth designer – one who has narratively “already been eliminated” – produce a collection to show under the tents. The potential problem with this popped up during the very first season, when a few attendees wrote that the “eliminated” collection of Austin Scarlett was superior to any of the final three.

When the penultimate show of the third season saw all four of the contestants present particularly strong designs, the judges & producers threw up their hands and declared that they all would show and be in the final challenge to see who would win. It was an interesting step, in that it made television’s best “reality challenge” show a little less visibly unreal.

The current season four took awhile to show up. Tim Gunn, formerly the head of the Parsons School of Design where the competition takes place, had left Parsons to take over as the head of design at Liz Claiborne. His presence as mentor to the 15 designers – he’s the perfect Henry Higgins – has more than a little to do with the show’s popularity & his signature phrase, “Make it work,” has become part of the contemporary lexicon. Just last week one of the build team members of Mythbusters, a “let’s blow this up for science” show that is the antithesis of Runway, was not only quoting Gunn on the air, but imitating his clipped & precise manner of delivery.

Runway does a better job of showing creative people being creative than any television show ever, but half of its pleasure lies in the personalities. In addition to Gunn, host Heidi Klum sparkles as she shows up in one impossibly fabulous outfit after another – made even more pronounced in seasons 2 & 3 when she was going through a pair of pregnancies. Elle magazine fashion director Nina Garcia & dour, always dressed in black Michael Kors round out the regulars, performing solely as judges in addition to Klum & a rotating “celebrity” jurist.

I don’t know what happened this season, but the word on the street is that there will be only three finalists this year even though five designers presented last week in Bryant Park. The five remaining contestants include Rami Kashou from Ramallah in the West Bank, Christian Siriano, only 21 when the competition started, Chris March of San Francisco (already well-known in the gay & theater communities for his costumes for Beach Blanket Bingo), Jillian Lewis from Long Island, a talented designer with serious time-management issues, and “Sweet P” Kathleen Vaughn from Los Angeles, at 46 the senior contestant. Virtually none of the contestants are really newbies to the design world – one worked for Ralph Lauren, another already has had gowns worn by the likes of Jessica Alba. One contestant who was eliminated near the end of the competition, Victorya Hong, successfully competed to have her own show at Bryant Park this year as well. So, yes, this is the year in which six of the original fifteen contestants made it to the tents in the park.

One “innovation” this year has been that the show has really not had anyone who could be called a “villain,” a standard feature of all reality TV. In each of the first three seasons, it was very clear who the villain was and, in each case, the villain made it to the final three, even if he or she did not deserve to be there. One, Jeffrey Sebelia, won the third season competition.

Actually, I think the show was in the process of evolving – or identifying – this season’s villain, Carmen Webber, when she was eliminated in one of the earlier challenges. Soon thereafter another contestant, three-time All America swimmer Jack Mackenroth had to drop out due to illness. Because of some upcoming “team” challenges, the producers were then forced to re-up Chris March, the last contestant at that point to have been eliminated, and the group of competitors pulled together in a way that I’ve not seen in any previous season. It is not that everyone is friends – Christian’s catty comments has the rest of the cast’s eyes rolling. But they all seem to take the pint-sized designer from Annapolis as if he were just an annoying kid brother. Even Jillian, who is all of 26, feels like she’s at least a decade his senior. Plus it’s hard to have a villain who is not only both younger & shorter, but also more talented, than everyone else. If Christian just learned to listen & care about others, he’d be the total package.

If I have any complaints about this season, it’s mostly that the designs themselves have not been up to the standards set in previous rounds. Rami is great at draping fabric – but that is all he does, the proverbial one-trick pony. As befits his background, Chris’ pieces tend toward the cartoonish – that he’s survived something like five challenges since being “uneliminated” is itself a considerable accomplishment. My guess is that he’s not going to be one of the three “finalists” even though you can see his Bryant Park show here.

The other contestant whom I expect to be eliminated is Sweet P, the post-hippy LA designer who seems flabbergasted by every single assignment & has not won any of the ten weekly challenges. Somehow, she has managed to hang on in elimination after elimination. When she stayed & the popular Ricky Lizalde was eliminated, I think everyone watching must have gasped. Ricky’s designs often don’t work, but he always has some idea.

The other two whom I expect to show besides Rami are Jillian & Christian. If the judging is on pure talent (as it was last season), the winner overall will be Christian, unformed as he is. If it is on whose clothes women would want most (as it was the second season), then I think Jillian. Jillian should benefit from having an entire month to work, even tho the designers always discover one last “design challenge” waiting for them when they return to New York. I can’t even count how many times this year Jillian has been sewing her model into her outfit as they literally were proceeding to the runway.

I should note that if you check around on the web, you will discover that almost everybody who attended the show in the tent had the same idea as to who the winner should be. One site even has links to photos of each collection and a poll. The one discordant note that I've seen, however, came from Victoria Beckham, the celeb judge, so I think it could go either way.

One of the interesting aspects of this show is just how many of its participants have gone on to make use of their success here, even if they didn’t get all that far into the season. Get into the final six, which is really about the point when it stops being a crowd & turns into a community, and you’re suddenly a hot ticket in the garment district. Now a number of these folks already were hot tickets before they began on Runway. But Austin Scarlett, who finished fourth in season one, is already the creative director at Kenneth Pool. That’s not hot. That’s blazing.

Uli’s swimwear
was the top-rated outfit
in this year’s finale
according to viewers

The television equivalent of a print ad’s mouse-type, the small print at the bottom of the page that the advertiser needs to include (in pharmaceutical ads, it sometimes shows up literally on the verso of a full-page spread) but doesn’t really want the prospective customer to read, the credits that roll at the end of a show just as the first commercial pops up starting the bridge to whatever show is next, is especially interesting for a reality-based series like Project Runway (PR), where it indicates that judges make their decisions in consultation with the show’s producers. That little detail explains at least one, and possibly two, of the hit shows major surprises at the end of its third season.

The first of these was a decision not to eliminate one of the contestants in the second most important challenge of the season, and thus to present a Final Four at Olympus Fashion Week instead of a final three. The second may have been the actual decision as to the winner of the series itself.

In actuality, there have always been four contestants showing work at Fashion Week. The timing of the show’s airing requires it or else the live audience at the event will know in advance who the final three challengers are, which is certain to get out. During season one, this caused something of a stir as several fashion world commentators preferred the collection shown by Austin Scarlet, who turned out later to have been the one already eliminated.

On September 6, I correctly predicted just who would make it to the final four, but felt convinced that one of the two women on the show – Uli Herzner, an East German native now soaking up the sun & Cuban colors endemic to Miami, or Laura Bennett, the statuesque architect whose preference for classic evening wear suits her perfectly in designing for older women, not exactly TV’s favored demographic – were destined not to make it to the final challenge. In retrospect, I think that the judges were ready, and planning, to eliminate Uli at this next-to-the-final challenge when she threw a spanner into the works by clearly winning the challenge, putting the judges into the (for them) untenable position of having to choose between fan favorite Michael Knight and this season’s villain, Jeffrey Sebelia, the one-time junky & alcoholic who specializes in costume wear for overage rock stars. Since the show’s narrative in its third season hinged on this epic, if thoroughly artificial, joust between good and evil, it would not do to resolve it two full episodes before the grand finale.

The solution, tho, was simple enough. Just announce that no one was disqualified and send all four to Fashion Week. In reality, what this meant was simply not airbrushing the number four finisher out of the final episode. Problem solved.

The more troubling possibility is that this same concern with narrative, rather than with fashion, may have altered who actually won Project Runway overall. I say this on the grounds that the ultimate winner, Sebelia, makes sense only narratively, and not in terms of the twelve outfits he showed at Fashion Week. Now there are obviously people who think the world of Jeffrey and his vision of style, just as there are people who think Desperately Seeking Susan, a 21-year-old motion picture that presents the retro-avant clothing of lower Second Avenue as somehow fashion forward, is a documentary of the 21^st century. These are the same people who think they just invented dressing all in black.

To underscore that this is not just me feeling sour grapes – after all, my favorite designer, Michael Knight, was the first eliminated at the finale (albeit with some reason) – it’s worth taking a look at the actual ratings of dresses in the Fashion Week show by fans on Project Runway’s website. Rated on a scale of 1 to 5, Jeffrey’s highest score was, as of Friday morning, 3.89, making him the only designer among the four not to have an outfit with a score above 4.0. On the other hand, he had four outfits with scores below 3.0.

Michael, the first eliminated, had one outfit rated at 4.10 and just two outfits rated below 3.0. Statistically speaking, his scores for his outfits outpaced Jeffrey’s. Now it’s true that Knight’s collection was disjointed and over-the-top, with at least two pieces that were just variants of one of his winning challenges. The two challenges he won in the series both came in situations where Parsons School of Design chief Tim Gunn had seriously criticized what Knight was in the process of putting together, and he listened to these critiques & improvised effective tho more modest outfits at the last minute. The youngest of the final four, Knight seriously needs this kind of direction and the two months on your own to create a collection of twelve pieces left him to his own devices.

Again as of Friday morning, Laura Bennett, the second challenger to hear the dread “You’re out” from PR host Heidi Klum, had one outfit rated at 4.02 and just one rated by viewers at below 3.0. Her collection was for the most part predictable but impeccable & that seems to be her special curse. As one of the judges put it, “when you buy one of her dresses, you know you will keep it forever.” But her range is narrow & she definitely is not aiming at Paris Hilton as the ideal customer. Still, her overall ratings from the show’s fans were higher than Sebelia’s.

So it was Uli Herzner who ultimately should have won Project Runway. Her collection was more coherent than Sebelia’s, and she had the top-rated (by the fans anyway) outfit of the entire Fashion Week extravaganza, a shimmering gold bikini with one of her patented print dresses, which on Friday morning had a score of 4.35. In fact, six of her outfits – half of her entire collection – had fan ratings higher than Jeffrey’s best score. Her lowest rated piece received a 3.51 (that would have been Jeffrey’s second highest score). She was also the only designer to have more than one piece with fan ratings over 4.0.

The problem, from the perspective of the show’s narrative, is that Uli herself is bland. She’s shy and her English isn’t perfect (tho I suspect that it’s better than she thinks it is). Last season’s winner, Chloe Dao, was likewise an American immigrant escaping a Stalinist country who came across as fairly bland on television. You can envision the producers squirming at the idea of giving the grand prize to the same story twice in a row, especially after so many viewers concluded that the second season should have been won instead by Daniel Vosovic (the second season’s representation of goodness incarnate), so many in fact that he kept popping up in a Saturn Roadster (how did he get that? he wasn’t supposed to have been given one, since he didn’t actually win) during commercial breaks this year.

Now I don’t want to presume that fan ratings on the show’s website should be viewed as anything objective. But in the world of fashion, unlike any other creative endeavor save possibly for the movies & rock & roll, success has everything to do with a popularity contest. And objectively, based on the individual ratings of the 48 different outfits shown at Fashion Week, Uli trumped everyone else with her scores. Jeffrey, on the other hand, had the lowest. Further, with the exception of zippers as a design element in a green-and-white striped dress, none of his other pieces showed much of his wannabe edgy side. Like the second season villain, Santino Rice, an acquaintance of Sibelia, Jeffrey’s strategy for the final show was to tone his style way down and come across as much more “normal” than he really is. Unlike Santino Rice, he actually seemed to pull it off. Yet many of his pieces commit the worst of fashion faults – they’re bland, predictable & retro in a Woolworth’s sort of way, which is not retro-avant in the slightest.

One of the most important moments in the history of Reality TV as a specific genre came at the end of the first season of Survivor when Richard Hatch, the so-called naked guy & future tax outlaw, the villain of that season, ended up winning the million dollars. I think the producers were betting on the future of Project Runway and concluded that it made far more sense narratively for the “bad guy” – the contestant whose rudeness to everybody was unrelenting & who actually made the mother of one of his competitors cry – to win PR this year, even if his collection didn’t warrant it. The reality is that all four of the final collections were sufficiently unique as presentations, so that they could make a plausible case for whomever they picked. But the dead fly in this soup is that they noticeably picked the worst. And as much as a couple of the judges – Nina Garcia of Elle magazine and Michael Kors – irritate the heck out of me, I would love to see how each of the four judges actually scored the final four. I’ll wager that the raw scores are not how the show itself turned out.

Are the producers within their rights in intervening, if that is what happened? Of course they are. Fortunately, winning isn’t everything on this show. Anyone who finishes in the top six is pretty much guaranteed fast-track entrée into the fashion world at whatever level they are prepared to handle. For one thing, they’re already famous. Several of the shows at this year’s Fashion Week, itself a competition to earn one of the seventy spots available during the week, were presented by former PR contestants. Indeed, Malan Breton, who made it only through the second challenge this season, was himself able to mount an official show this same year. Uli declared herself completely satisfied with the final results of the contest and she may be the biggest winner of all. She wasn’t, after all, supposed to be there among the final contestants. But it’s her outfits that fans (and future shoppers) will remember the best.

Brother Cavil (Dean Stockwell)
interrogates insurgent leader
Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan)

Season three of Battlestar Galactica is the first TV series to be based in part on the U.S. occupation of Iraq, told principally from the perspective of the occupied. There is a comprador government with a puppet president, brutal prisons that involve torture (one of the series’ regulars lost an eye), even – and the show is designed to make you root for their success – suicide bombers who take special aim at the police force recruited from among the occupied. In the context of the show, the actions of the insurgents – a term they use repeatedly – make total sense. They’re right intellectually and emotionally. The occupiers are cyborg type critters out to bring God, peace & democracy to the occupied, with summary executions if need be. Because their personalities can be downloaded & inserted into new roughly identical bodies, complete with their old memories, whenever they “die,” these toasters with attitude have a strong sense of the continuity of spirit & are basically crazy Christians – there is a Mormon subtext if you’ve been trained to pick it up. The occupied are humans, remnants of the population of Caprica, driven off-world by a revolt of their “Cylon” slaves, hunted to the edge of extinction. Now, however, the Cylons have had a change of heart & want to free the humans from their godless, violent lives. This of course makes the Cylons more lethal than ever. Dean Stockwell’s portrayal of Brother Cavil, a Cylon priest – or priests, actually, since there are a limited number of Cylon body types and we see the same characters over & over, sometimes several at once – as a kind of Donald Rumsfeld is spot on. Prisoners are moved about wearing Abu Ghraib-like hoods over their heads. Battlestar Galactica is the perfect antidote to fascist fantasies like 24. The opening episodes – the Sci Fi channel ran two shows back-to-back to start the season – will air again on Friday, October 13 at 1:00 PM Eastern & at 3:00 AM the following morning. Battlestar Galactica normally airs Fridays at 9:00 PM.

You can tell that it’s an Aaron Sorkin production just by the way the camera weaves & slides throughout the entire studio, before it settles on a single speaking figure, the old signature “walk-and-talk” take that Sorkin patented during his years as the creator of West Wing, only this time without the talk or focus on a single moving individual, until you realize that what you are hearing is a comic warming up the audience of a television show – an absolute clone of Saturday Night Live, tho we learn soon enough that it’s on Fridays – that is about to go on. Quickly enough we learn the premise behind the first show of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: the show is entering its 20^th season & its creative juices have been sapped – there is only skit ready for that night that anyone is enthusiastic about at all, save for the representative of the network’s “broadcast standards” department who is insisting that this is the one skit that absolutely has to be cut. When director Judd Hirsch agrees to the cut as the night’s opening bit – a parody of Bush & Rove in the Oval office – begins, he feels like crap & so “pulls a Network,” a reference to Sidney Lumet’s 1976 Oscar-winning film about newsman Howard Beale’s famed freakout – “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it any more” – although, in what may have been the most telling detail from the opening episode of Studio 60, tho Network is referenced several times, it’s credited always to its writer, Paddy Chayevsky, and never once its director. Hirsch breaks into the opening skit & tells the audience to change the channel, to turn off the TV, that this show will be terrible – “it’s not even good pornography” – and is allowed by the show’s line director Timothy Busfield to stay on air ranting for 53 seconds.

All of this occurs simultaneous to the celebratory welcoming dinner of Jordan McDeere (Amand Peet), who has just been hired as the president of the Entertainment Division of mythical network NBS by its president Jack Rudolph (played by Steven Weber), who in turn reports to a corporate overlord played in the opening episode by Ed Asner. McDeere isn’t supposed to begin until the following Monday, but instead she’s plunged into an immediate crisis as Rudolph rushes to the studio & fires Hirsch on the spot. Her solution: bring back the creative team that Rudolph had fired several years back and who have gone on to become famous for their collaborations as writer & director (not unlike, say, writer Sorkin and his favorite collaborator Tommy Schlamme). McDeere knows one critical secret: the director, Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford, Josh on West Wing), just failed the physical for his “completion bond” on his next picture due to a positive test for cocaine. The film he and Matt Albie (Matthew [Friends] Perry) are planning to make can’t get done for at least two years as a result. There are only multiple problems: Weber hates these guys, Matt has just separated from his wife, an actress on Studio 60 who is an evangelical Christian, and Danny hasn’t told anybody, even best buddy Matt about his coke test. You can actually watch the entire episode online on its NBC site (click the link above), if you want, but you know that by the end credits, Matt & Danny are strolling onstage to ensure the cast that they are there to “rescue” them.

It’s got all the hallmarks of a Sorkin job: it’s smart, fast, layered, has a premise that enables it to employ celebs as themselves – Felicity Huffman & Three 6 Mafia on the first episode – and in cameo roles (Asner & Hirsch) – and is brilliantly written. Even in a producer’s medium like television, it all comes down to the writing – that’s always been the source of the great unevenness, say, in The Sopranos, where creator David Chase writes only a couple of episodes per season, and West Wing was doomed the minute Sorkin left after a conflict with network execs. The only difference between Studio 60 and The West Wing, which the London Guardian not long ago called “the best television series ever,” which is not as much an overstatement as it might seem, is that this is about a sketch comedy show, so, hey, lots of drama, but who cares? It’s not like they have Matthew Perry & Brad Whitford portraying UN peacekeepers in Darfur or running a black site detention center in an unnamed country in central Asia. Studio 60 may do a little to demystify the most over-exposed medium in today’s media-glut culture – they could have been running a dot com start-up after all, not so different from the ad agency that Timothy Busfield had on Thirty Something – but this seems unlikely and ultimately unnecessary. Didn’t Sorkin do this for ESPN with Sports Night?

This of course is the ultimate gotcha of network television – an absolute inability to focus on anything more substantive than Seinfeld’s puffy shirt. The disease & health care crisis that loom behind ER and Gray’s Anatomy, or the legal/social issues that get brought up in Law & Order, CSI and even Crossing Jordan are there really just as framing devices. Studio 60 is offering us a serial “dramedy” that will hinge on the ad rates for Victoria’s Secret or Budweiser. If you don’t have much time for television – and I have precious little – this feels considerably more hollow than the reality series Project Runway, even as its production costs & marshalling of creative resources is a hundred times greater. And since Sorkin is just one of seven writers actually listed for this show, you can rest assured that it won’t always live up to the flash-bang repartee that characterized Monday night’s opening episode. So unless you get into the narrative of how a young woman can function as a corporate exec – Amanda Peet in some variation of Allison Janney’s C.J. Craig role in West Wing, just younger, sexier & more comfortable with power – Studio 60 is going to feel like one hell of a lot of frosting on a very small cake.

The third season of Project Runway (PR) has whittled a particularly inchoate initial group of would-be fashion designers into a more cohesive, if not tight, group of six, four men & two women. If talent alone were the judge, the final three who will get to present at this fall’s Fashion Week will be two women & an African-American male. And if talent alone is the determining factor, PR will have its first black champion in Michael Knight, a Montgomery, Alabama designer now living in Atlanta, completing a perfect trifecta of unlikely winners in the clubby, coterie-driven world of NY glamour, having already had a rural eccentric, Jay McCarroll, right out of a Jonathan Williams poem, and former Vietnamese boat person, Chloe Dao, who had in fact already baled on her attempt at the NY scene & has a boutique now in Houston, the city in which she, her seven sisters & her parents all live. Michael Knight is a quiet, positive guy who doesn’t trash his fellow designers & promises his mother that he will pray every night, not one drop of irony in his voice. His style might be characterized as soft hip-hop, but his primary assets are a terrific eye, a good mind, and solid experience fitting clothes on human beings.

But this being reality TV – even reality TV at its best – talent alone is unlikely to determine the final trio of contestants, since one of the narrative imperatives of the genre is that The Villain must reach the finals. This season’s villain, Jeffrey Sebelia, interestingly enough is a personal friend of second season baddy, the self-proclaimed great Santino Rice. Like Rice, Jeffrey is a veteran of the LA music scene, designing clothes, primarily jackets, for the likes of Marilyn Manson & Steve Tyler. Also like Santino, Jeffrey is instantly recognizable by his style, in the current case a ring of textual fragments (the largest word is “Detroit”) tattooed around his very long neck. And, again like Santino, Jeffrey has been through the school of hard knocks, being both a recovering alcoholic & heroin addict. But where Santino was a good, if never subtle, designer, Jeffrey is uneven at best, and not terribly adept at the craft details that are essential tools of this trade. And where Santino’s grandiose personality made for great TV, Jeffrey is just a jerk.

In fact, he wasn’t supposed to be the bad guy this season at all, that role having earlier been assigned to a much more talented & interesting character, Keith Michael, whose classy designs were overshadowed only by his own infinite self-regard. Unfortunately for the series, Keith, who had never designed women’s wear before, was also (surprise!) deeply insecure & was caught using prohibited resources to overcome his lack of experience. As a result, he was sent packing & several of the remaining contestants stepped up their arrogance in an attempt to gain the curiously coveted slot of Most Despicable Wannabe.

Jeffrey, tho, sealed the deal by taking some huge risks in verbally assaulting the mother of one of the other challengers, Angela Keslar, in a show for which mothers & sisters of the contestants were brought in as models for a “designing for the everyday woman” theme. Jeffrey had no clue what to do with this short, plus-sized Midwesterner & listening to what she wanted certainly wasn’t in his game plan. When his design for a layered dark dress began to go awry – and it was dreadful – he blamed the mother, telling her at one point – to the amazement of the other designers – that he objected to her “even being here.” Having reduced the woman to tears he barely survived that week’s challenge only because one of the contestants perennially on the edge of elimination, Robert Best, made his plus-sized model look like a giant over-ripe tomato.

The two other contestants who ought to make the finals are Laura Bennett, a 42-year-old architect & mother of five (plus pregnant with numero seis), whose advice to career women who want to have families is “never dress down,” and Uli Herzner, a German born (and speaking) Miami resident who is a master with prints and color. Both women are competent & at least moderately distinctive in their style, but neither strikes me as exceptional. Laura exudes competence – she would be a competent surgeon or pilot, competence is literally what she does. But her style is bland but elegant & her intuition is for women much like herself, professionals over 40. The somewhat younger Uli is more of a free spirit & her sense of color can be bold. But her range is quite narrow. Every successful garment she has made has been a variation on a narrow theme.

By comparison, Michael has repeatedly demonstrated a great sense of design & deft competence at the craft skills necessary to the trade. More than any other designer, you can see in him all the ways in which clothing design is every bit as much an art form as it is pure commerce. Twice thus far, Knight has made major last-minute revisions at the suggestion of Parsons School director Tim Gunn, who mentors the challengers, and both times come up with terrific results. One challenge he won – Knight is the only designer to have won two consecutive challenges this season – and the other he deserved to win. I suspect that the only reason he didn’t was – not racism, but the show’s narrative need to give Jeffrey one victory now that the season has trimmed the contestants down to just six. The same was true one week earlier when Vincent Libretti, a geeky 49-year-old and the show’s first married man in three seasons (whose signature is a pair of glasses with frames thick enough to embarrass Clark Kent), won a contest I suspect just to keep Michael from winning three straight & sapping the season of its narrative suspense.

In effect, Michael has been the best designer four weeks in a row now. More than any other single designer in PR’s three seasons, he is in a completely different league than his competitors. Tho he won one week, Vincent is a surprisingly weak challenger to have reached the final six. One might say the same for Kayne Gillaspie, the Oklahoma “white-trash” (his term) former fatty – he once weighed over 300 lbs – who has gotten this far almost entirely on chutzpah & niceness, but whose sense of taste is the design equivalent of Elvis black-velvet paintings.

So I expect that Vincent & Kayne are goners, one tonight, one next Wednesday, which leaves us with Michael, Jeffrey, Laura & Uli. One of the narrative sleights of PR is that, in order to keep people from knowing the final three in advance, the last four contestants all get to show at Fashion Week, tho only three are then broadcast on the series on Bravo (the fourth place finisher of the first season, Austin Scarlet, apparently made great use of this opportunity, pushing his career ahead faster than eventual champion McCarroll). I have no clue who will be in that unlucky fourth spot this year, tho I fear it will be Uli or Laura, when in fact Angela & Alison Kelly, both already eliminated, are stronger designers than Kayne, Vincent or Jeffrey.

They’ve gone, I suspect, because the show is so heavily marketed to a gay male audience – the show has yet to mention Vincent’s family! Still, this may be the only show in all of reality TV that takes genuinely talented individuals & then focuses on their creativity as one determining factor as to who wins. Some of its key recurring personalities – including supermodel-host Heidi Klum, the exact combination of Lolita & the Marquis de Sade, with her chirpy auf wieder sehn to each contestant as they’re eliminated, and the elder-preppy Tim Gunn (his signature phrases are make it work and carry on), are perfect for the show, and, if it’s hard to ignore what a dummy “top designer” Michael Kors is – also what a mediocre designer – it’s a small price to pay for the best running narrative on television. Now if the show could just free itself of some of the genre’s clichés. It could starting by auf’ing Jeffrey tonight.