It's a guilty pleasure
Scott D. Pierce
And yet ... we watch them anyway. They're fun. They're entertaining in an odd way. They're almost addictive.
In the case of reality/competition shows, more often than not the ones that draw you in tend to do so in large part because of the personalities of the contestants. Both personalities you like and personalities you don't.
Such is the case with "Top Design," the Bravo network's permutation on its highly successful "Top Chef" franchise. Only, as you'd expect from the title, this one features a group of interior designers competing against one another.
The show follows the basic reality/competition show format. A dozen contestants ranging in age from their early-20s to their late-40s gather in Hollywood and are presented with various decorating challenges. They get encouragement from the host, interior designer Todd Oldham; they get critiqued by the judges — interior designer Jonathan Adler; Elle Decor Magazine editor-in-chief Margaret Russell; and interior designer Kelly Wearstler.
I'm at least a little bit embarrassed to admit this, but I'm addicted to "Top Design." Hey, football season is over and I've got time for another spectator sport.
"Top Design" is definitely just that. Sometimes it's an individual sport; sometimes the contestants work in teams. There are people or teams to root for and people or teams to root against.
And sometimes it's a competition sport even for members of the same team. Heck, in Episode 1 teammates Michael Adams and John Gray cat-fought with each other from beginning to end.
There are even fallible officials, leaving us to disagree with their calls.
In a way, "Top Design" is more suited to TV than "Top Chef." Viewers can't actually taste the food in "Chef" — we can see how it looks and imagine, but we have to rely on the judges to tell us what's good and what's bad.
On the other hand, we only need our eyes to see the results in "Design." And design is, of course, subjective — we don't have to be interior designers ourselves to know what we like and what we don't.
The judges often act all superior and condescending — even catty — when they're evaluating the contestants' work, but at the same time we can sit at home and evaluate the judges. And they don't always come off so well, either.
(Note to Jonathan Adler: Anyone who uses the tagline, "See you later, decorator," when he's dismissing eliminated contestants has no right to act superior about anything.)
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