Models of the Runway

Diana and I don’t watch Models of the Runway religiously. We catch it On-Demand here and there, as we did last season. The show has a lot of problems. For one thing, the models have absolutely no measurable control over their destiny, which makes for less than compelling TV.

I realized last night that my biggest problem with the show is its timeline. It currently covers the time from the moment a designer is eliminated through to the next day when the designers choose their models (and thus eliminate one) before finding out their next challenge. Ok, that makes sense. It bridges the gap from one episode of Project Runway to the next.

The problem is that the models don’t DO ANYTHING in that timeframe. It’s their downtime between challenges. As a result, the show is interesting in the beginning for the post-runway show sequence and interesting at the end for the elimination, but it’s horribly boring in the middle. Anything that happens that day feels contrived because it is. In last week’s episode they had a pool party. I guess so we could see the models splashing around in their bikinis.

I mean, we don’t really care what the designers do on their day off between challenges; do we really care what the models do?

What would be infinitely more interesting would be if the show covered the same timeframe as Project Runway. You could still start it immediately after the designer elimination and go through the post-runway sequences, but then have a slow fade and jump back in time to the models finding out what the challenge is. Let’s see their reactions. Let’s see what they think of their designer’s dress the first time they see it. Let’s see them struggling to get ready for the runway show. Let’s see them teaching the kids or the heart disease women how to model. Let’s see the same events of Project Runway, but from the Model’s perspective. Then you just skip over “the day of nothing happening” and go right to the eliminations to end the episode.

That would be worth watching.