NBCUniversal/Christopher Polk/NBCUniversal
(L-R) TV personalities Brad Goreski, Melissa Rivers and Giuliana Rancic from ‘Fashion Police,’ which despite having ample material from the VMAs, failed to deliver the snark Joan famously added.
The new “Fashion Police” team needs a little more time at the academy.
“Fashion Police,” the long-running clothing-and-style review that became the last and best showcase for the late Joan Rivers, returned to E! Monday night with Rivers’ daughter, Melissa, in the host seat on the couch.
Rivers and regulars Brad Goreski and Giuliana Rancic, joined by guests Nene Leakes and Margaret Cho, couldn’t have picked a better night to return, since they got to dine on the VMAs.
Talk about an all-you-can-eat fashion buffet.
Unfortunately, the new group collectively felt tentative, as if they weren’t sure just how to make all those dishes into a meal.
It’s not that there were no one-liners or that someone threw out all of Joan’s bottles of snark.
Assessing Rita Ora’s gown, Cho remarked, “I didn’t know Vera Wang made a ‘Duck Dynasty’ collection.”
She also said Nicki Minaj looked like “she belonged in King Kong’s hand.”
Goreski suggested one of Miley Cyrus’ outfits looked like she was dressed in a box of Skittles.
But overall the night felt a little timid, and the reason, frankly, was Melissa.
She’s a much more traditional host than her mother, who died last September after a botched medical procedure. Rivers was conciliatory, pleasant, fair-minded and reasonable, which is fine, except her mother was more from the school of “Oh, c’mon. She looks like she dressed in the dark in a Dumpster.”
Neither approach is right or wrong. But Joan’s style did define the “Fashion Police” brand, and when almost everybody loves almost everything, well, you can just watch the live red carpet if gushing is what you want.
MARIO ANZUONI /REUTERS
Co-Executive producer Melissa Rivers (R) host Joan Rivers (C) and co-host Kelly Osbourne attend the E! panel for the television show “Fashion Police” during the Television Critics Association summer press tour in Pasadena, California in this file photo taken April 15, 2011.
They even gave a collective pass — Melissa’s term — to Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
Funny thing is, you sensed the show knew it.
Before the longest segment, the one devoted to Miley Cyrus and her 8,936 outfits, a voiceover teased to stay tuned for dishing on “all her catastrophes.”
But when the hosts returned, most of them turned out to be in love. Leakes and Rancic ran out of adjectives and superlatives.
Goreski was skeptical, and Cho added some one-liners, but aside from the “dot dress,” almost everything was “You go, Girl.”
Goreski coulda used a little Joan for support — a point perhaps implicitly reinforced by the introduction of a segment called “What Would Joan Say.”
Whatever Ouija board they were using wasn’t nearly as unfiltered as Joan. But the idea was telling.
Melissa has said repeatedly that she has a more droll, subtle sense of humor than her mother, which is fine. It’s also likely that as she hosts more, she and the show will develop more of a rhythm.
At the very least, a couple more Melissa shows should accomplish one of the immediate goals, which is wiping away all trace of the ill-fated interim “FP” earlier this year with Kathy Griffin.
The lingering lesson from the Griffin disaster, however, remains: It’s really really hard to revive a show so strongly identified with one person and one personality, especially when that personality was Joan Rivers, and even when you called that person “Mom.”
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Entertainment – NY Daily News