Vince Talotta/torstar news service
Supermodel Heidi Klum is the host and producer of Project Runway. The Emmy-nominated show pits aspiring designers against each other.
IN THE BIG LEAGUES: I hope you checked your TV guides last night and saw that NBC moved Project Runway from its cable sibling, Bravo US, to prime time. If you missed it, don’t sweat — they’ll be running another episode next Monday night at 8 p.m., offering a brief taste of the third season of the show for the tragic souls waiting impatiently for Life Network to start airing the new season later this summer.
It’s not the only crossover happening this summer between the networks and their cable farm teams — CBS ran an episode of Brotherhood on Saturday night, an Irish mob drama that debuted on Showtime, and runs on The Movie Network here. ABC has slipped Kyle XY, a Family channel show, into its Friday night lineup, while Fox actually debuted It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia on the main network for three weeks before it settled into its home of the FX channel’s schedule.
While most of these are simple cross-promotions — the network equivalent of those trays full of cheese cubes and toothpick-studded wiener slices at the supermarket — it’s hard not to see NBC’s Project Runway taste test as a way of bringing buzz to the network’s lacklustre Monday night summer schedule. On most nights, network television is a relic, something us senior citizens associate with flared jeans, James At 16, gas shortages and SALT II Treaty talks. The majority of the remote-fondling world knows that a cable channel hit isn’t the rough equivalent of a network dud, but it finally looks like the corner office types at the networks have figured that out.
MY GUEST TONIGHT IS A COMPLETE F**KING WANKER!: Gordon Ramsay is my hero. The celebrity chef can be seen on Hell’s Kitchen on Fox and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on Food, stalking through a variety of eateries, seething and bellowing obscene imprecations against anyone who fails to meet basic standards of culinary proficiency or hygiene. He’s proof that TV has become a place where we get to watch people behave in a way that no one would tolerate in the absence of cameras, as much as we’d all love to work without the emotional governor that keeps everyday life relatively civil. The joy of watching Ramsay is that his wrath and rage is backed up by righteousness — almost anyone cringing under his verbal barrage eminently deserves the harrowing.
According to a short, cryptic item on the Digital Spy website, Ramsay — who also hosts something intriguingly called The F Word on Britain’s Channel 4 — is set to host a Fox talk show. “Irreverent stuff,” he said. “It’s very interesting.” I am so stoked.
I might be completely disappointed, but I have visions of Ramsay politely inviting some celebrity twerp, glowing with unearned self-regard, onto his couch and interrupting their first answer with a vein-bulging, blistering assault on their intelligence, dress sense, and genetic feasibility, before sending them away, weeping like a mortified child, with a last, barked out comment on their “girl hair” or lingering bodily odour. Please please please please.
