Dear Drop Dead Diva,

You could stand to lose about 5,000 lbs … in the form of all the gratuitous guest stars taking time away from your stellar cast. In just over a season, the plus-sized dramedy has been bursting at the seams with guests including Paula Abdul, Delta Burke, Elliot Gould, Ricki Lake, Sharon Lawrence, Chad Lowe, Liza Minnelli, Kathy Najimy, Rosie O’Donnell … even Tim Gunn, for chrissakes. We get it, Project Runway is on Lifetime now!

Drop the dead weight D-listers! Or at least get D-list queen Kathy Griffin to spar with series regular Margaret Cho.

Kisses,
Gig Matrix

P.S. You can bring back Gilmore Girls’ Emily Kuroda, but give her some funny! Her appearance was a total wasted opportunity.

Well, here he is in one of those press-mute-really-hard Staples ads, looking weary and defeated, like he’s there shopping for a mouse with which to hang himself.

The first season of Rupaul’s Drag Race was hilarious, bringing us Camerooooooooon, Barbie doll hats and the rich cultural meme Face! Face! Face! I give face! Beauty, face!. What it was largely lacking was some drama, with only the villainous Rebecca Glasscock bringing the shade.

Well, the second season clearly sought to remedy that, cause it is bigger, badder and bitchier. Early on, plus-sized Mystique threatened another queen: “I will whoop your ass! Bitch, I am from Chicago!” The Interior Illusions lounge has been full of threats and tears, with Tatiana, Morgan and Tyra tussling over who will get to be the next Glasscock. Tatiana even called out Tyra for being a bitch on the runway in front of all the judges. And Rupaul derided one queen’s look with a withering, “There is one word for your outfit: raggedy!”

Continue reading What a drag

Taste the happy, Michael!

As much as it pains me to say this, I never really liked Dollhouse. I, who once coined the phrase “In Joss we trust” to get people through rough patches of Buffy and Angel, have always felt confident that Whedon ultimately knew what he was doing. But even if he did know what he was doing, Fox isn’t giving him the chance to pay it off. The barely renewed show has just been cancelled early in its second season.

Continue reading Dollhouse Shuttered

I’ve been having a hard time getting behind this fall’s new TV lineup because so much of it feels old. I realize we live in a time when Hollywood is so out of fresh ideas they’re making movies out of Battleship, Candyland and Asteroids, but still … this season just feels stale. Just take a look:

FlashForward: Short of the spinoffs, this is the worst offender in the bunch because it’s trying to act like it’s not totally ripping off another ABC show, Lost. And yet, the season premiere featured:

• An opening scene where the main male character is wandering through a chaotic disaster with people around him hurt and yelling for help as something then explodes, raining fiery debris down around him.
• An out-of-place animal (In Lost it was the polar bear in the jungle; in FF it’s a kangaroo in the city)
• An overarching mystery that everyone is trying to figure out (i.e. what happened to us?).
• A large set of main characters, including Dominic Monaghan (Charlie) and Sonya Walger (Penny).
• You get to know all of these characters through … oh wait, flash forwards, not flashbacks. You’re right. This is a totally different show. My bad.

Among the others:
Accidentally on Purpose: Saw Knocked Up? Then you’ve seen this.
The Cleveland Show: A spinoff of Family Guy.
Community: A lot like The Breakfast Club, but it’s self-aware enough of this to actually poke fun at the similarities, so I give it a pass.
Eastwick: A show based on a movie based on a book.
The Forgotten: = Cold Case
The Good Wife: OK, this isn’t technically like any other shows, just real life. And I experience enough secondhand embarrassment for the actual spouses of cheating politicians that I don’t want to watch a fake one.
Hank: A show about a man who loses his job and has to work for minimum wage to support his family. Ah yes, nothing like mining an actual near-depression for a comedy. Again, not a ripoff of another show, but still …
Jay Leno: This speaks for itself, I’d say.
NCIS: Los Angeles: In following seasons, I fully expect an NCIS: Chicago, NCIS: Salt Lake City and NCIS: Duluth.
Melrose Place: It’s a reboot just like last year’s 90210.
The Middle: This looks remarkably like Malcolm in the Middle, which is where I assume they also stole the name from.
Trauma, Mercy, Three Rivers: All three are medical dramas hoping to replace ER or recapture the glory days of Grey’s Anatomy.
Vampire Diaries: Based on a set of books, this is really just Dawson’s Creek meets Twilight.

And that’s pretty much your lineup. The few exceptions that show some originality:
Glee: This musical-number-infused show is the best of the bunch and has met with much praise from fans and critics who aren’t Aaron (who apparently hates power ballads and happiness).
Modern Family, Cougar Town: Both of these also show some promise and have fairly new takes on various family dynamics and … well, cougars.

Drop Dead Diva has the most offensive premise imaginable. The Lifetime dramedy, which launched this summer, is about a dumb young blonde model (Deb) who dies in a car crash and comes back to life in the body of a smart, fat, lonely lawyer (Jane). Not only must she adjust to being a size 16 and deal with new-found donut cravings, but she also has to work with Deb’s ex-fiance, who happens to be Jane’s new coworker. What’s a girl to do?!

Yet somehow, miraculously, despite the questionable premise and terrible title, Drop Dead Diva is not offensive at all. It’s surprisingly warm, funny and endearing. With its law cases that unsubtly mirror Deb/Jane’s emotional conflict of the week and the yearning for love and meaning, the show could easily have been Ally McBeal with food: Ally McDonald’s, if you will.

Continue reading Big girl, you are beautiful

So this is what it feels like when your team loses the Super Bowl. In what can best be described as an upset, I’m upset that Adam Lambert did not win American Idol. It’s not that I dislike winner Kris Allen, but we already have a John Mayer. He’s certainly cute and he has a nice voice, but he’s milquetoast. Bring a book. A boring one. About milquetoast.

Adam never fit into the typical Idol mold, and that’s what made him so fantastic. He wore sparkly guyliner and bedazzled epaulets, and his voice was straight out of a hair metal band from the 80s (but in a good way). Pictures leaked online of him in drag and kissing men, so maybe he never really had a chance in this traditionally teenybopper race, despite the Idol judges’ constant, unanimous praise.

I’m confident Adam will have a huge career regardless (see past Idol loser Jennifer Hudson), and thank god he won’t have to release Idol judge Kara DiGiorno Pizza’s hideous song “No Boundaries.” But it’s hard not to feel disappointed. When his name was announced, a clearly shocked Kris Allen said, “Adam deserves this. I’m sorry.” And he couldn’t have been more right.

First the good news: Dollhouse has reportedly been picked up for a second season. The bad news: That season finale was so uneven that I wasn’t sure I wanted it to be renewed.

Much like the entire first season, the last episode “Omega” was a rollercoaster of ups and downs. For every good twist was an eye-rolling plot point. And after an entire season of building up to the murderous Alpha, we get a twitchy multiple personality disorder with a side of Natural Born Killers. Yawn.

Worst of all is main character Echo herself. Initially intriguing as a blank slate, once her character’s true personality started to be revealed, I was looking around frantically for something to rasa that tabula. Echo is special, we’re told, and worth cutting up Amy Acker over. But why is she special? Other than the fact that she’s played by series star Eliza Dushku, we’re given little evidence. Show, don’t tell, Joss.

That said, there have been glimmers of promise and an outstanding episode here and there. Angel had a horrible start and eventually got pretty good, so there’s hope yet. But Dollhouse is going to need some substantial renovations to live up to Whedon’s best.

P.S. Mellie, we’ll miss you, big girl!

After losing Project Runway to Lifetime in a very bitter, very public battle, Bravo has taken the hit fashion design show’s formula and quite blatantly ripped it off. The Fashion Show is like a cheap knockoff handbag you buy in Times Square: It kinda looks like the real deal, and it might fool some people, but look closer and you see that its plastic sewn-in label reads “Kate Spayed.”

The format is virtually identical: A bevy of bitchy designers bicker, backstab, boast about how great they are, sew on and so on. But with Project Runway itself growing increasingly so last season, The Fashion Show needed to offer something more to keep viewers from following PR to the house that The Golden Girls built (and then left).

While PR offers supermodel Heidi Klum, fashion designer Michael Kors and Marie Claire fashion director Nina Garcia, TFS gives us Target designer Isaac Mizrahi and someone from Destiny’s Child who isn’t Beyoncé. The duo lacks the fine-tuned chemistry and informed criticism of PR‘s seasoned trio.

But what’s most startlingly absent is someone to compare to Runway‘s clucking mother hen, breakout star Tim Gunn. His hilariously fussy bons mots are always delivered with a great deal of good humor and compassion, which tempers the often catty judges. The Fashion Show misses this crucial detail and comes off cold and mean-spirited. When Mizrahi dismisses the first episode’s loser with the would-be catchphrase, “We’re just not buying it,” you can’t help but feel the same of this designer impostor.