Project Runway Anatomy of a Disaster

Advocate.com Editors

November 18 2009 2:15 PM EST

November 17 2015 5:28 AM EST

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The show had many glorious advantages: millions of devoted viewers, drama-prone design wunderkinds, Michael Kors's sharp tongue and Tang-colored skin. But the reinvention of Project Runway on the Lifetime network fell flat, gay critics say.

In a Wednesday article on The Daily Beast, writer Choire Sicha plumbs for answers. "Lifetime took us through some scary hole of broken space-time," he writes, "revealing a world with a Project Runway nearly identical to, yet somehow totally opposite from, the Project Runway we knew so well from our universe."

Polling a small sample of the show's once-core demographic ("smart, urban-living homosexuals who can afford to both wear clothing and own televisions") Sicha compiles the following blunders as primary reasons for Project Runway's demise. Among them:

-The show's L.A. diaspora. "Sun-addled brains made for irrelevant hack design."

-Absence of compelling drama (and competent story editors). "They signed on people with stories rather then people with personalities. ... Crying is not a story. Go to therapy or drink more or something. It was sooo tiring to see that gay's whinnying and weeping week after week."

-Klum despotism. "In the end, this was the year of The Heidi. Because of the oft-missing Kors and [Nina] Garcia, her power on the show became as swollen as her belly."

For Sicha's complete litany, click here.