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‘Heathers’ TV Series Coming to Bravo

By Judy Berman on

On the list of announcements that have the power to make our day, anything Heathers-related ranks right at the top. So imagine how thrilled we are to discover that Bravo — which is just dipping its toes into scripted programming — is rebooting the 1988 teen-movie classic. The Hollywood Reporter breaks the news… Read More

Television

Uh-Oh: Did ‘Gallery Girls’ Replace Bravo’s Newly Canceled ‘Work of Art’?

By Judy Berman on

In a recent post, we noted that we’d love to see TV shows about the art world with a bit more substance than Bravo’s fun-but-soul-killing Gallery Girls — you know, ones like Bravo’s other reality series, Work of Art. Well, so much for that, because Gallerist is reporting that Work of Art has… Read More

Pop Culture

A Brief Survey of Gallerinas in Pop Culture

By Heba Hasan on

The gallerina is everywhere. Over the past several years, the female art gallery assistant has subtly slipped herself into a host of rom-coms, Candace Bushnell-esque chick lit, and sitcoms about independent women trying to make it in the big city. Now, the stock character is getting her own reality show. Bravo recently released the trailer for its new series Gallery Girls, which premieres August 13 and follows the lives of young women in the New York City art world.

So what about the female gallery assistant makes her such a popular female trope? In a hilarious excerpt from Mindy Kaling’s book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? that was featured in The New Yorker, Kaling deems the art gallery assistant a popular rom-com specimen because of her posh pedigree and vague, unthreatening career. The gallery girl also plays another important function in the realm of female-geared media, as a sort of balance to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl; while both are creative, the Gallerina is as focused and ambitious as the MPDG is whimsical and carefree. After the jump, we’ve rounded up our favorite gallerinas in pop culture as a quick study of this 21st-century archetype. … Read More

Television

Does the World Need Another Reality TV Cooking Competition?

By Caroline Stanley on

If you’ve ever wished that Top Chef was more like The Amazing Race, with a little bit of Survivor thrown in for good measure, then you’ll want to tune in to Bravo’s newest cooking competition Around the World in 80 Plates, which premieres tonight at 10pm. The show’s contestants range from a chef de cuisine at New York City’s Fatty Crab and the executive chef for the Boston Red Sox to a guy who used to work as a private chef in a sorority house and an oddly pretentious dude from Hollywood who has dubbed himself “Cheven” (as in Chef Keven). But as hosts Curtis Stone and Cat Cora pointed out at a launch party we attended earlier in the week, it’s not just experience in the kitchen that will determine the winner; they will also need to have the street smarts necessary to navigate foreign cities, and perhaps even more importantly, people smarts, given the fact that the losing team will decide who gets voted off each week. This means certain strategies that wouldn’t traditionally apply in a cooking competition — like intentionally making average food in order to fly under the radar — will inevitably come into play. … Read More

Television

Is Bravo Developing Long Island’s Reality TV Answer to ‘Girls’?

By Judy Berman on

Bravo sure has a lot of new series in the works: Just a few weeks ago, we learned that it had greenlighted 13 new shows, including its first two scripted programs. But apparently that’s not all. Deadline reports that the network has put six more series into development. The new slate… Read More

Television

The Sucklord Is the Star of ‘Work of Art’ Season 2

By Judy Berman on

Bravo’s weirdest reality competition show returned last night, and we’re confident that Season 2 will be every bit as bizarre as Season 1 — in fact, it may even be crazier. The highlights of this year’s cast include a woman who looks like a punk-rock Mayim Bialik and photographs her own sculptures of viscera, a street artist who’s always talking about how much time he spends in jail, and a rural Arkansas art teacher who (sigh) continued Work of Art‘s great clown-painting tradition. But by far the most fascinating character so far is also the show’s most established artist. “My name is The Sucklord,” is how he introduces himself — and if, like Simon de Pury, you dare to call him by his given name, he’ll correct you. … Read More

Television

Hipsters on TV: A Retrospective from Fonzie to ‘Portlandia’

By Judy Berman on

The oxymoronical has happened: Hipsters have gone mainstream. After two weeks on the air, it’s clear that NBC’s Two Broke Girls and Fox’s New Girl are ratings hits — attracting around 12 million and nine million viewers, respectively. What the sitcoms have in common is young female protagonists who (due to living in Williamsburg, baking cupcakes, and dating musicians or wearing glasses and being portrayed by Zooey Deschanel) could fairly be described as hipsters. And it looks like the trend is only just beginning: 25-year-old micro-budget filmmaker Lena Dunham is currently prepping a show called Girls for HBO, and MTV recently gave viewers a sneak preview of the pilot for the Wavves-scored I Just Want My Pants Back, about 20-something creative types living in Brooklyn. (Don’t worry if you missed out — it may well have been the worst half-hour of television we have ever watched.)

But just because they seem to be having a renaissance in 2011, that doesn’t mean hipsters are new to TV. In honor of an archetype whose roots stretch all the way back to the ’50s, we’ve compiled a retrospective of our favorite hipster television characters, from Happy Days to Portlandia. Since we figure you probably know about some incredibly obscure shows we wouldn’t have heard of, we hope you’ll assume your best elitist voice and tell us who we missed in the comments. … Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and The Backstreet Boys are among the many pop artists whose songs have recently been banned by China’s Ministry of Culture for containing “vulgar content.” The offending tracks must be removed from Chinese websites by September 15, or their owners will face prosecution. [via Guardian]

2. … Read More

Television

Rating Bravo’s New 2011 Series

By Judy Berman on

If the Academy Awards are “The Gay Super Bowl,” then the day Bravo announces a new programming slate may be the queer-TV equivalent of Christmas. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, the 2011-12 season will be the successful network’s most ambitious ever, featuring no fewer than 11 new series and an armload of second-season renewals (welcome back, Top Chef Just Desserts). After the jump, we rate each forthcoming show for its dramatic potential and camp appeal and try to predict whether it will be worth watching. … Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: Peregrine Honig

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

Work of Art finalist Peregrine Honig takes our intertwined obsessions with youth, fashion, and celebrity, and turns them into quirky, unsettling art.

Perhaps Kansas City’s best-known art-world export (thanks to her star turn on the Bravo reality show), Honig makes paintings, sculptural installations, and performative, fashion-based projects that combine folk-art inflections and a childlike love of color, cuteness, and baby animals with a worldly, satirical voice that’s not afraid to get profound, funny, and even scatological. … Read More