Project Runway All-Stars

This new show premiered on Lifetime last week and it features contestants that were snubbed by Project Runway in various seasons, competing for a prize that totals $500,000 and a one-year guest editor position at Marie Claire magazine. You can watch Project Runway All-Stars episodes here. The competitors do seem to be of a higher quality than in the regular show, and they feature all your favorites from past seasons which is a bonus. The designers featured this time include Kenley Collins, Rami Kashou and Mondo Guerra, which are some of my all-time favorites that have been on the show. Kenley is mean but quirky and her design style always reflects a retro point of view, Mondo is completely out-of-the-box and surprises me with his designs which are wholly unique every week, and Rami just oozes classic couture and impeccable construction. I won't lie, some of the designers this season (like Mila and Austin) are some of the most annoying people that have ever been on the show, but I guess the point is to see if they can all co-exist for awhile and make some ridiculous reality drama.

Angela Lindvall, host

The new mentor, aka the position of Tim Gunn in the original, is Joanna Coles, a woman which pretty much embodies the Devil from 'The Devil Wears Prada'. She's a lot more stern than Tim Gunn and seems to be giving far less helpful advice, for the time being (there's time for her to redeem herself). The new hostess on this show is supermodel Angela Lindvall (which I've never heard of before but the show claims she's an extremely famous person) and she is fairly awkward in her delivery of the lines but tolerable and even comes across as being nice. It's definitely nice to see a fresh face on this show. I was sick of Molly Sims in the Project Runway Accessory show because she was always incredibly rude and she sounds like she has a speech impediment (not to be rude to people with speech impediments, but do they really have to host a TV show?). Is it just me or does Angela Lindvall remind you of a bootleg Taylor Swift? The show seems to be sticking to the same format but adding fresh faces with different points of view, maybe ones not as nasty as the previous show's. One major change this season is that nobody will ever get immunity, which means every week someone will be eliminated and it will be unexpected.

Georgina Chapman, judge

Either way, let's talk about the other new changes: the judges! Let me just say that Isaac Mizrahi is incredibly annoying, I dislike his fashion all together and I have no idea what makes him qualified to be a judge on the show. With that being said, Georgina Chapman is the other judge and she is the co-founder and designer of Marchesa but what is most shocking about her is that she is married to Harvey Weinstein (possibly the ugliest man in the world) and even bore his child. Georgina makes all the models on the Project Runway shows look like trolls because she's absolutely stunning and her dresses are very popular among the Hollywood elite on red carpets (this probably has something to do with her husband).

"The Doctors" - Variety Show Review

For years now, I have been bombarded with strange tidbits of information regarding the daytime show "The Doctors" which airs all over North America on CBS. This show is a monster-baby of the long-running, recently ended "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and "Dr. Phil". I caved after many years of avoidance, and due to utter lack of willpower to find the remote and change the channel, and watched my very first episode today in its entirety.

The main host seems to be Dr. Travis Stork, who is a bootleg version of a Brad Pitt-esque leading man. There are numerous other co-hosts, I think I counted up to five of them, each of which has a different 'specialty'. One is a plastic surgeon, who obviously thinks that the solution to every problem is going under the knife for one of supposedly "simple" procedures (of which they never explain the full spectrum of side-effects). Another doctor who seems to be the most genuine of the bunch is an OB-GYN who speaks in a more matter-of-fact way. On top of that they even have Jillian Michaels who is a fitness-guru, constantly sporting her spanx, as if she doesn't go anywhere in regular clothing. Now that I think about it, none of them ever seem to be wearing regular clothes, the doctors are usually wearing lab-coats or scrubs, except for the plastic surgeon who dresses like a mob boss. These so-called doctors are extremely hard to trust because of their appearance, they are so overly made-up that you cannot see a pore on their skin and they don't come across as having a shred of humanity. They are cold, concrete and downright seem like they don't care at all about the information they're dispelling or the people on the show. Also, can you trust a host who first came into notoriety through participating as a love interest on "The Bachelor" TV series? That's a rhetorical question because you can't.

This show has the makings of a reality soap-opera with a Gray's Anatomy fragmented plot. Basically each segment is a story about how one viewer or another has a medical issue and these doctors/hosts either defer to colleague or attempt to diagnose these very simple and obvious cases themselves. The majority of the information that is given on this show is extremely diluted for the audience and does not inform the public in a proper and intelligent way. Rather, after you've finished watching an episode you wonder if you've learned anything at all. You're definitely better off reading the Wikipedia article on a disease, or better yet, visit your doctor!

From the episode I watched, what I retained as information was that if you're unhappy with the way your face is sagging you should have plastic surgery, albeit you may even want to consider not even going under for the procedure (that's a disgusting thought, isn't it?). I also learned that if you have cankles, where there is no clear definition between your calf and your ankle, you should have liposuction to remove it or make your calf muscles bigger by bouncing up and down with really heavy dumbbells. What kind of advice is this? Am I dreaming? How can they actually be advising people to have plastic surgery when they haven't explored any other options? Why not focus on diet, water retention and sodium intake, why not focus on skin-care through natural means? This show exhibits little to no common sense.

Even if there's any shred of truth in this show, it is counter-balanced by the absolute recklessness of advising an entire demographic of what I assume to be mostly stay-at-home moms that they can be better looking and healthier through very little actual inconvenience by performing surgeries. Now I know a thing or two about surgeries, and if there's one piece of advice I can impart on my appreciated fellow readers, it is not to take any surgery lightly. The risks of secondary infection, scarring, drug addiction and a myriad of other factors are so large that I can assure you, you are much better off trying to diet and control your insignificant aesthetic problems naturally. Nobody needs a panel of uppity doctors to yell at them through the TV screen with sob-stories of people who have let their problems go on too long without ever visiting a real doctor. This show is one paternity test away from being Jerry Springer or The Maury Show.