The naked truth
Finally recognizing that straight women comprise a much greater market than straight men for fabulous gay best friends, Carson Kressley has taken his act to the Lifetime Network. His new show, How to Look Good Naked, is essentially Queer Eye for the Straight Guy 2.0. The hugs and the tears remain, but this time around women are the primary beneficiaries of Carson's aesthetic expertise, and he doesn't have any co-hosts to steal screen time from. To live up to Naked's title, Carson encourages his charges to pose in the buff for a photo shoot at the end of each episode.
Compared to the metamorphoses on hardcore makeover TV like Biggest Loser, The Swan, or Extreme Makeover, the metamorphoses on Queer Eye were always pretty quick and painless. Some waxing, a haircut, a new suit, an awesome couch -- in the Queer Eye universe, life-changing transformation didn't require exercise, cosmetic surgery, or psychological counseling, just shopping.
On How to Look Good Naked, the same principle holds true. Like the slobby men on Queer Eye, the blobby women on Naked aren't so far gone they're beyond easy repair. Instead, they're super-cute girl-next-door types who, like many Americans, happen to be overweight. Because their pudgy bodies don't correspond with fashion mag and even reality-TV ideals, they have self-esteem issues and ostensibly aren't enjoying life as much as the planet's runway models and skinny reality TV stars are.
To change that, Carson helps the women who appear on the show get fitted with more flattering clothes and hooks them up with hair stylists and make-up artists. He also projects photographs of them clad in their undies on a building in Santa Monica, and gets the world's nicest strangers to praise their plush hips and ample muffin tops. This is indisputably the most refreshing part of the show. In an era when it sometimes seems as if every message-board poster on the Web is filled with more hate and bile for their fellow humans than famous misanthropes like de Sade and Sartre, it's nice to see a little magnanimity in action.
And apparently a kind word from strangers can do wonders. With stronger bras uplifting their boobs and unusually charitable passersby uplifting their spirits, women who previously couldn't bear to look at themselves in the mirror slide out of their shells like barbecued oysters. Pose naked? Sure!
So far, alas, the photo shoots that close each episode have been anti-climatic. In the first one, the newly confident pin-up gal sinks into a pillowy mattress and barely reveals a flash of shoulder. In the second, the plump hottie shows a little hip, but gives centerstage to a brazen bedsheet that has no qualms whatsoever about flaunting its stuff in front of the camera.
Modesty plays a part in these decisions, no doubt, but the final photos are so discreet and so carefully composed they end up undercutting the show's premise. Carson promises to help imperfect women embrace their bodies as they are, not their bodies as idealized by 35MM alchemists. It would have been more accurate to call the show How to Look Good Naked from a Very Specific Angle While Mostly Hidden from the Camera -- but apparently that doesn't sound inspirational enough.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]