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SOON, it
will all return: the mammoth egos, the nasty feuds, the
career fates that teeter on choosing just the right
fabric swatch. Bravo is bringing back its reality
competition set in the dangerous world of interior
design. And this time, Top Design is overseen by
the unscripted wunderkinder best known for the network’s
fashion hit, Project Runway.
Ordinarily, this would be an item of interest mainly to
reality addicts, the kind of people who race out to buy
The Hills on DVD because they just can’t get
enough Lauren Conrad. But the back story on this one is
a real beaut, more unkempt than Top Design mentor
Todd Oldham’s shaggy hair.
Amazingly enough, the story manages to involve not just
a producing duo who go by the handle Magical
Elves—seriously, that’s not only their corporate name
but also how people in the industry casually refer to
them, leading to such fairy-tale utterances as, “We have
a long history with the Elves”—but also film and TV
mogul Harvey Weinstein and his (former?) friend, NBC
Universal boss Jeff Zucker, who now sit across from each
other in a high-stakes lawsuit over Runway.
We know,
this is a lot of information. So let’s take it one step
at a time. It’s important to understand because the tale
vividly illustrates just how crucial reality shows have
become to big media companies, not to mention how
thoroughly these programs now permeate popular culture,
to the degree that a very limited number of truly
original unscripted concepts are now stretched across a
seemingly endless roster of programs.
First,
Top Design. The show, which has its Season 2
premiere on September 3, is an unabashed knockoff of
Top Chef, another Bravo competition show made by the
Elves, except with interior design instead of cuisine as
the subject. The similarity between the two programs is
so obvious that no one even bothers to mask it. When I
asked the Elves—that would be executive producers Dan
Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz—about how Top Design is
different from Top Chef, the question could
easily have seemed a bit beside the point.
“In a
lot of ways, it’s actually the same, I think, in terms
of the thing that we love to do, which is observing the
creative process and watching people who are amazing,
great characters, who are passionate about their careers
and their creativity and what they aspire to do,”
Lipsitz told me. She described Top Design as a
spinoff of Chef.
Even so,
the Elves’ takeover of Top Design is big news in
reality TV, mainly because of the duo’s impressive track
record as producers. Executives routinely describe them
as among the best overseers of reality programming, a
field that’s roughly as crowded as a Lollapalooza mosh
pit. The Elves have been key developers of the
reality-competition format, which throws a bunch of
colorful, temperamental creative types into a
pressure-cooker environment and then braces for a final
showdown.
Their
résumé also includes NBC’s Last Comic Standing
and Bravo’s Project Greenlight, but the capstone
of the Elves’ achievement is Project Runway,
which started with weak ratings in 2004 but has since
bloomed into a cable sensation, the kind of show that
melds a gay/downtown aesthetic with suburban status
obsessions and thus can spark lively chatter at any
cocktail party. The Runway formula now fuels
Bravo’s entire programming engine. If you’re so tired of
seeing Bravo’s shelter-porn show Flipping Out on
the TV sets at your gym, well, blame Runway.
Last
month Runway’s Season 5 rollout gave Bravo its
most-watched premiere ever, with 2.9 million total
viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research.
But this
will be the last season for Runway on Bravo.
Later this year—the premiere date is not yet certain—the
program will move to Lifetime. The Elves won’t be back.
According to an executive close to the show, their
duties on Runway will be taken over by reality
whiz Jonathan Murray, of MTV’s The Real World and
E! Entertainment’s Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
How and
why Runway moved, touching off these other
changes, is the basis of that lawsuit in a New York
court. Earlier this year, Bravo’s owner, NBC Universal,
sued the Weinstein Co., which produces Runway,
claiming the Weinsteins reneged on a deal to give NBC a
right of first refusal before taking the show elsewhere.
Harvey Weinstein has denied this, testifying last month,
“I’d rather cut off my arm than give them a right of
first refusal.”
The
court is weighing a motion from NBC for a preliminary
injunction that could halt the Lifetime airing until the
entire case has been tried (a spokesman for NBC declined
to comment on the case; a representative of the
Weinstein Co. did not return a call). In the meantime,
the suit has turned up some juicy revelations, such as
the fact that Runway host Tim Gunn was paid
nothing at all for his work on the first season and
earned just $2,500 per episode for Season 2, even as the
show’s ratings blossomed.
But even
as Zucker testified that Runway was “one of the
most central programs to the entire company”—a dramatic
claim for a title many think of as a niche reality
program but probably true given the importance of NBC’s
cable assets—Weinstein argued that NBC Universal had
“ruined” the show with a bunch of copycats. In other
words, too many similar programs like Top Chef
and Top Design.
In many
ways, the battle is reality-TV iteration of the timeless
network/producer confrontation over how to best wring
the value out of a hit. But the effects have already
been far-reaching. In May NBC Universal trumpeted a
rich, exclusive overall producing deal with the Elves,
effectively cutting the pair’s future ties to Runway,
their main calling card.
Lipsitz
called leaving the show “a heartbreaking decision for
us.” But it may have been a necessary loss: The new deal
with NBC will presumably give Magical Elves an ownership
stake in their new shows. As Lipsitz bluntly told Daily
Variety, “We don’t want to do work for hire anymore.”
That
leaves open the question of whether the “reality
lifestyle” craze that’s dominated cable over the last
few years is, well, maybe not dead, but at least very,
very tired. The Elves plan few changes on Top Design
beyond the new host, India Hicks, a British-born
stylista who happens to be the granddaughter of Lord
Mountbatten and the godchild of Prince Charles. Cutforth
said they’ve tried to make the design challenges, or
assignments, “a bit more practical and less conceptual,
less abstract.”
Andy
Cohen, a senior vice president at Bravo, insisted the
lifestyle reality genre still has room to grow. “Is the
category saturated? No. I think one of the things that
makes our shows pop is that they are about peeling the
layers off of the creative process,” he said.
The
Elves don’t sound quite so sure. Lipsitz admitted that
there are a lot of competition shows out there right
now, and said the duo is looking at other types of
programs.
“I guess
the market is fairly democratic,” Cutforth said of the
competition fad. “And if there are too many of them,
they’ll probably go away. I don’t know how many more
competitive reality shows people have time for.” |
