'What Not to Wear' season premiere: Did you like the live format?
Last night Stacy London and Clinton Kelly got a little cuh-razy on the social-media-happy season 10 premiere of What Not to Wear — it was live! Agggghhh! No! So awkward!
“You have to keep quiet so she doesn’t suspect anything,” Stacy warned the crowd of over 200 people. Wait. Strike that; reverse it. “But when she walks in, GO NUTS!”
I applaud the team for trying something different (and hooray for Ted and Carmindy sharing the stage), but WNTW is not meant for the live studio audience world.
Fashion disaster Anna Papadakis — a yoga instructor and “the Lady Gaga of Long Island” — turned out to be adorable and brave, but I couldn’t help but picture how much better a well-cut version of her story would have been. I was a little surprised she didn’t diva out at one point and “need a moment” like I’m sure so many subjects do. I wouldn’t have minded seeing that — Anna reminded me of Marisa Tomei’s character in My Cousin Vinny as if she’d been assigned to play a cross between Brittany Murphy and Fran Drescher in a shaky high school play. A meltdown would have been awesome — if you’re gonna do it live, do it right!
Anyway, the poor girl-gone-wild seemed pretty shell-shocked the whole time and would have been much more entertaining after a good edit.
Instead of the shopping segments (my faves — I like to lazily hit up Bluefly while watching), we had to watch Anna wander through an on-stage “store” (creepy!) while Stacy and Clinton filled time rattling off impressive social-media stats (85 percent of Facebook users voted that Anna’s treasured white Badgley Mischka fur vest “looks like a dog bed”) and answering lame audience questions like — I kid you not — What’s the deal with navy blue?
Anna’s aha moment — “I would never buy this, but I love it” — just wasn’t the same without some swelling background music and precious zoom-ins on Stacy and Clinton’s tears.
I love zoning out to What Not to Wear, but not like this! What about you? Did you like the new, one-off live format? Was it cool to see the gang improvise, or did the whole thing feel like a poorly scripted reality TV results show?
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