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In a part of the conversation that didn't make the magazine, Allen recalled the early days of his own fame: "The most annoying, condescending thing that friends, fans, journalists, and people from my previous life would do," he remembered, "is tap me on the shoulder and say, 'Enjoy the ride.' As if the five of us weren't completely aware that fame can be a fleeting thing. It was like, fuck you. Enjoy the ride being an accountant." He also had some harsh words for Project Runway's first-season winner Jay McCarroll. "I used to like him, when I first met him," Allen said. "He was asking for advice about how-do-I deal-with-the-sudden-fame bullshit. And I gave him the phone number of one of my guys at William Morris, who I really like. And the next thing I heard about Jay McCarroll is that he was talking shit about the five of us behind our backs. He's whiny, he's immature, he's catty — he's really kind of a jackass, whether he won Project Runway or not." Excerpt from longer article in the same magazine on Bravo's reality TV shows. For the contestants, the implicit promise of these shows is that they’re time machines, compressing the brutal urban mechanics of getting ahead—the political maneuvering, the grinding incremental labor—from a matter of years to months. The problem is that reality-show success is no substitute for real-world experience. “There is something a little bit cruel about all the attention,” says Ted Allen, the dignified cooking guru of Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and a recurring judge on Top Chef. “Because during the season you’re in one of the shows, you are famous for a while, and you get to enjoy all the fun of that. But you’re not someone who has any sort of expertise that’s going to keep you on television. There’s no certain road map for translating that kind of ephemeral success into a life of yachts and bling.” |
