Lifetime
Since Project Runway debuted, it has been rightly praised as the model (so to speak) of a high-quality competition reality show: entertaining, smart about its subject and visually crisp. Then, for season eight, Lifetime decided that if an hour of Project Runway was this good, 90 minutes would be 50% better.
Instead, the superfluous half-hour hangs on the show like an oversized bow on a bridesmaids’ dress.
Runway is hardly the first offender among bloated reality shows. The Biggest Loser regularly weighs in at two hours, American Idol finds ways to take an hour to package two minutes’ worth of results drama, and I just finished watching a screener of a two-hour Apprentice whose inflated boardroom session made me long for the excitement of a half-day-long human-resources presentation.
But I particularly notice the problem on Project Runway, partly because it’s a show that worked so long and so well at an hour. And—while I’ve watched some but not all of this season—the format doesn’t seem to have changed appreciably this season. It’s not structurally a different show, it’s just longer: more judge discussion, more designers waiting backstage, more not-quite dramatic exchanges in the work room.
When you’ve watched a show over seven seasons as we have Project Runway, you internalize its rhythms and rituals like muscle memory. You have an instinctual feeling for what comes next, and then next, in what order and at what pace. So the padding and bloat in this season is all the more obvious—it feels like an off note in a familiar piece of music.
Now maybe bigger Project Runway fans will disagree with me, but in my defense I’ve watch every season since the show started and rarely missed an episode. And the thing of it is, I actually feel this season is an improvement on the previous one in terms of casting and the apparent talent of the competitors. Or at least I think so—because, since there are only so many hours in a day, I haven’t been watching (or finishing) every episode.
Last night’s bridesmaid’s dress challenge, for instance, was a strong assignment that gave the designers a real-world challenge with real-world models. But it would have been better at two-thirds the length. Right now, Project Runway is like someone who’s just dressed and now needs to look in the mirror and take one thing off. Or as Tim Gunn would say: you need to edit this!