somebody please put ‘project runway’ out of its misery.
The fashion design reality show is a corpse of its formerly beloved self.
Queering the Burbs is a distillation of pop culture, politics and queerness published twice weekly by Joe Erbentraut and this is what’s good, this newsletter’s monthly column for paid Queering the Burbs subscribers exploring the movies and TV shows I’ve been enjoying (or not) over the past month. Anyone can read a preview of the column below, but you’ll need to subscribe or upgrade to access the whole thing.
Listen, I’ve been seated for Project Runway for decades now. I’m what you might call a lifer for this particular piece of IP.
It wasn’t long after the show first premiered in 2004 that I was on board. Remember that first season? It had everything. We had mentor Tim Gunn. Judges Heidi Klum, Nina Garcia, and the wickedly quotable Michael Kors. The work room at Parsons. The trips to Mood. And, of course, the contestants straight out of central casting: Austin Scarlett, Wendy Pepper (RIP), Daniel Franco, Kara Saun, and the eventual winner Jay McCarroll. The show was perfect.
The several seasons that followed kept that magic mostly intact. I bought the DVD boxsets and watched those early seasons over and over. I had a major crush on Daniel Vosovic. I bought merch from Kayne Gillaspie’s website. I marveled at Christian Siriano’s impeccable emo kid-faggotry and that Angela woman and her pathological obsession with rosettes.
Over the years, I remained dedicated. In college, I helped stage a Project Runway-inspired fashion show and helped bring contestant Nick Verreos to campus for a student event. In my first year in Chicago, my roommates and I didn’t have cable so we went to a gay sports bar in Uptown (remember Crew?) and demanded they screen the show on Thursday nights. I interviewed multiple contestants from the show, and even attended a Chicago premiere of a Project Runway All Stars season.
But oh how the mighty have fallen. Maybe some kind of curse linked to the show’s former unfortunate ties to Harvey Weinstein is to blame but the show in its current iteration—the show premiered its 22nd season earlier this month, on Freeform of all places—is almost unwatchable.
And when I say that, I will add that I’m not expecting to return to the glory days of the show either. Sometimes you just catch lightning in a bottle and it’s practically impossible to keep that magic alive for years on end. But the show’s latest season makes its ill-advised shift to filming in Los Angeles and airing on Lifetime look like a wise creative choice.
First, there’s the glaring problem of Mr. Make It Work himself—Gunn—going M.I.A. While Siriano has taken on the designer mentor role since Gunn exited the series in 2018, he’s never been able to come anywhere near the heart, soul, and gravitas of his predecessor.
Then there are the judges. Klum is back as a host and judge after a few seasons away trying to make an Amazon Prime version of the show work, but the rest of the panel lacks the insights and comedic chops of Kors or the more recent additions like Brandon Maxwell or Zac Posen. In fact, the current panel doesn’t feature any actual designers. Instead, viewers are stuck with Law Roach, whose comments jab at the designers’ egos but without any hint of Kors’ tongue-in-cheek theatricality, and Tyra Banks, who also doesn’t bring much to the table.
And while many of the designers are clearly talented and deserving of the spotlight, we don’t get to see much footage of them actually designing their looks. The current season decided to cast 22 designers—for the 22nd season, duh!—just to immediately eliminate an absurd six (6!) of them in the first episode. By the time the third episode begins, four (4!) more designers are also gone.
