Making It Work, Well Enough Anyway

BRAVO

If a show's ratings potential can be judged by the number of people who ask me about it, unsolicited, before it comes out, Tim Gunn's Guide to Style will be the top-rated television show of 2007. "Have you seen it yet?" people ask me. And "Is it any good?" And "Can I borrow the DVD?" And "Please tell me it's good, or I'll have to rip your beating heart from your chest."

What they're really saying is, "I really miss Project Runway. Please tell me Tim Gunn's Guide to Style will offer me a little taste of my sweet sweet Project Runway while I wait for it to come back." And to them, I have to say: sorry, it's not a substitute for Project Runway. (There's still Top Chef.) What it is, is a substitute for What Not to Wear. Not that you were looking for one.

Like that BBC-cum-TLC show, Guide essentially follows the pattern of finding some poorly dressed schmo (in the episodes screened so far, women), analyzing her and her closet, and reworking her look through fashion/psychological techniques that you could apply to your own look, but probably won't.

The show's saving grace--and this may be what keeps me from having my beating heart torn from me--is Tim Gunn. The high hopes for this show come from the tremendous affection for Runway's real star, and he (with costar/model Veronica Webb) doesn't disappoint. Where the various hosts of What Not to Wear often have seemed catty, or like they're performing for the cameras first and their clients second, Gunn and Webb class up the joint. As on Runway, Gunn has this remarkable gift for critiquing a subject right down to the bone, in a way that might be devastating if he didn't project a disarming professional empathy--you know, his earnest, crisp but slightly pained way of telling you that he just really, deeply, sincerely wishes you wouldn't, as it were, suck.

And his show doesn't, either. You could do much worse in picking a makeover show to watch right now. But [Gunn voice] I'm just very concerned that he save most of his energy for Project Runway. We can still tell the original from the knockoff.