My Pitch to Bravo

I hope Bravo's latest fully-scripted reality debacle, Tabatha's Salon Takeover, will finally have the network execs dousing somewhere other than the bone-dry well of stereotypical cultural havens for rich, frivolous gay dudes and the metrosexuals who envy their highlights and boot cut jeans. This will be Bravo's fourth drama-queen hair salon-related programming venture, sponsored by Paul Mitchell styling product and an apparently limitless supply of self-important anal-retentive hirsute douchebags trailed by an ozone hole like an aerosol shadow, but dear God I hope that network is way overestimating our culture's interest in professional hair setting. Pure complacency on Bravo's part: giving the salon makeover show to an arbitrary loser of perennial Television Without Pity favorite Shear Genius. It's like pointing to one of the "Real" Housewives of Orange County and letting her host a show about botched plastic surgeries (Face Off, in the tradition of wordplay titles) while her gray-haired husband is out dicking around L.A. in a European convertible.

Here's the next new prime-time reality hit: Hipster Death Match. We throw a bunch of attention-starved bohemians together in an impossibly large fixer-upper apartment; they spend the first forty minutes downing Merlot and Chimay on Bravo's dime, having casual sex and pillow-talk, and stealing each other's copies of Me and You and Everyone We Know — the director's cut — before each week's finale of two manorexic performance artists slugging it out. There's something for everyone: for Bravo's core demographic, HDM features hipsters, and for the rest of the population, it's got hipster death matches.