Reality TV That's a Cut Above

By James Poniewozik

Six years after the debut of Survivor, 14 after the premiere of The Real World, reality TV has been around long enough for potential contestants to realize that appearing on a reality show is perhaps not the genius career move it seemed to be. If you're lucky, post--15 minutes, maybe you get to host a show on the TV Guide Channel. If you're less lucky, you get to co-host The View. Maybe you just swallow your pride and do the whole thing over again, as on the oxymoronically named Big Brother: All-Stars. But more likely, you eat a few bugs, you win a few bucks, you date Flavor Flav, and pretty soon you're back on the couch with the rest of us zeros, without a True Hollywood Story to your name. Is that all there is?

It is, except for the contestants in reality TV's unlikeliest but most satisfying genre: shows about people who actually know how to do something. This week the fashion showdown Project Runway (Bravo, Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.) returns for its third season, having smashed Bravo's ratings records by proving that you can spin a good yarn from threads. Elsewhere, designers, chefs, moviemakers--even preachers--are turning to reality TV to show their stuff. Think of these series as American Idol goes to trade school competitions not for neophyte performers looking to get famous but for professionals to advance their careers long after the cameras shut off. In the summer of America's Got Talent--which might more aptly be called America Can Balance a Sword on Its Face--these shows are out to prove that America's also got creativity.

The godparents of this Geek Idol genre are Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz, a producing duo operating under the name Magical Elves, who created Runway and its culinary spin-off, Top Chef, and also produced Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's movie-director search Project Greenlight. The Elves' projects share one philosophy: "We feel that the creative process is inherently dramatic and interesting to watch," says Cutforth.

They feel that way now. At the start of Runway, Cutforth admits, "we were nervous that we could make people sewing into interesting television." Not only did they, but they did it without dumbing down the creative process. There's a scene in the first season in which eventual winner Jay McCarroll, stuck trying to draw up a design that is classic and tasteful while reflecting his flamboyant style, looks out the window and sees the burnished Art Deco crown of Manhattan's Chrysler Building, which he reinterprets as a dress. It's a better, more succinct illustration of creative inspiration than most novels and movies about artists manage. "That was a magic moment," says Lipsitz. "At best, we want to show that the way the individual characters see the world translates into their work."

Runway is far more successful than Greenlight was. Besides the fact that host-producer Heidi Klum looks better in a cocktail dress than movie producer Chris Moore would, Runway has the sizzle of a tense competition, while Greenlight picked its filmmakers right off the bat. (Perhaps learning from Greenlight, in Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett's On the Lot, for Fox next season, filmmakers will duke it out Runway-style.)

Just as important, Runway isn't afraid to be fun. Like the couture world itself, it plays with the tension between high- and lowbrow, combining earnest discussions of artistic intent with shamelessly over-the-top challenges. In the first challenge of Season 3, the contestants "source" the materials for their first outfits from the apartments they're staying in--tearing down chandeliers and shearing the fabric off mattresses. And the contestants know that performance is part of their business. A contestant in the Season 3 premiere lays out her "four cs" theory of success: "courage, creativity, cash and celebrity."

Magical Elves took much the same approach to this spring's Top Chef. Fox's Hell's Kitchen (Mondays, 9 p.m. E.T.), on the other hand, is more about heat than flavor; lobster-faced British chef Gordon Ramsay puts a group of cooks through boot camp, overseeing them with such helpful advice as "Move your arse!" Compared with Top Chef, the show places less emphasis on menu planning and presentation than on the chaos of running a kitchen--especially with a half-crazed Brit chasing you.

Kitchen is not likely to draw in Thomas Keller fans, but a broadcast network has to program for an Olive Garden crowd. "We wanted to create a show that I could watch, and I'm not a foodie," says executive producer Arthur Smith. "It's like a live sporting event. It's hot, there's time pressure, there's someone yelling at you, and there are sharp things. There's danger." Still, hundreds of food professionals applied for the chance to become chef at a new restaurant--though they'll probably be glad to escape without a cleaver in the back.

On HGTV Design Star (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T.; debuts July 23), celebrity is the prize: as on The Next Food Network Star, the winner gets to host a show on the channel. (Runway's winner gets, among other perks, $100,000 to start a business.) Otherwise, the show is basically Project Living Room--10 aspiring home designers try to please a troika of judges--with a focus on collaboration. In the first episode, the competitors work in teams to appoint the extremely narrow town house they're staying in. "Design is not all about your personal tastes," says HGTV programming vice president James Bolosh. "It's about melding them with the homeowner's." Or not, as when a zealous designer paints someone's treasured heirloom table in the show's second challenge. While it doesn't have Klum's star power, Design Star is sharp and addictive, with a memorable cast that includes a pair of ebullient twins, a loopy artist, a tense Janeane Garofalo look-alike and a 30-year-old single mom who, I'm certain, was chosen for her design talent and not because she was once Miss Utah U.S.A.

Ultimately, these shows work when they remind you why you care about the subject. They appeal to the curious part of you that leaned on the kitchen counter and watched Mom or Dad cook dinner or that lingers by construction sites. By showing the choices and ideas that go into ordinary consumer products--and using editing to speed up their creation like time-lapse photography--the series remind us that food, clothes and furnishings are not just frivolities but deeply personal expressions. The opposite happens with TLC's The Messengers (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.; debuts July 23), which, seeking nothing less than "the next great inspirational speaker," takes serious problems and renders them trivial. Ten contestants (among them a pastor, a surfer and an ex-cheerleader) deliver a speech to judges and an audience each episode after going on a "field trip"--which, in the premiere, involves spending the night on L.A.'s streets with the homeless.

If there's one thing more unsettling than a bunch of contestants dragging cameras to skid row as they vie for a book deal and TV pilot, it's seeing their responses critiqued as if they were singing a Christina Aguilera song ("You call that a speech?"). Messengers, to be fair, is self-conscious about that: in one scene, a homeless woman lectures TLC's cameras, "This ain't no damn zoo. These are human beings." She's right. This is possibly the best-intentioned--and creepiest--TV show you will see this year.

Of course, TLC did not invent the idea of inspiration as a performance, any more than Runway, Top Chef et al. transformed design, cooking and so on into entertainment. Isaac Mizrahi, Emeril Lagasse and Martha Stewart turned their fields into reality TV long before reality TV did, making their personae inseparable from their work. Says Kara Janx, who finished fourth on last season's Runway: Celebrity "is part and parcel of being a designer today. When people know the person behind the brand, they become invested in it." That said, she adds, "I want to die as a good designer, not as a TV personality." As if that were even a choice anymore.