Off-Screen Bickering Spoils Project Runway

Cattiness on Project Runway is part of the show's distinctive flavor, but it's legal wrangling between networks and producers that has kept the whole 6th season off the air. As a result, the finale, a live event tomorrow at New York Fashion Week, will be completely anonymous: Designers will be hiding backstage instead of getting facetime with the fashion elite, writes Monica Hess in the Washington Post in a spirited look at the whole mess.

The show's fate rests with the New York Supreme Court, which hasn't set a date to resolve the dispute between NBC, LIfetime and the Weinstein Co. But the maddening part, writes Hess, is that the show went on—and we should have been watching it since November. Presumably, the designers were "dismissed one by one with a frosty 'Auf wiedersehen,'" she writes. "But what if they weren't? What if co-host Heidi Klum started saying 'Later, alligator' just to switch it up a little?"
(More Project Runway stories.)