Design Star: And The Winner Is.......

Dawn breaks over the Designtestants penthouse at the Flatotel as the phone rings. Michael and Emily stop doing each others hair and race to the speaker phone where they listen to Auntie Vern congratulate them on making FINAL TWO! FINAL TWO! and then commands them to appear at Mount HGTV.

In the showroom, they face the panel of witches, well, a mini-gay man with a Napoleon complex, an unbelievably untalented designer who schtupped her way to TV infamy, and the fabulous Candice Olson.

Vern plays Great and Powerful OZ as he announces the...

FINAL CHALELLNGE

Design a space and then film a segment of their show idea.

And then the big surprise!

All of the losing designers, and let's face it, they're losers, especially that girl, what's-her-name, who was Hot Glue Gunned out in the first episode? Yeah, we see her get picked to be on Michael's team and then we never see her again.

Lo.Ser.

Anyway, each FINAL TWO'er's get to pick their team, with Emily going first. She picks Dan because she's spent the last few weeks in the company of gay lovers Michael and Courtland and she needs a man. Plus, he can build stuff, and that's hot.

Michael, of course, picks his favorite man candy, Courtland, and theirs is a sensuous hug.,

Emily then picks Casey. Stacey, Tom and Alex, while Michael picks Nina--I KNOW!!--Trent, of the Big Hat, Tera of Texas, and Julie, the Original Loser.

The designtestants are told to choose one of their former competitors to be their client and then to do their own show while creating a new one-bedroom space for their faux-client.

MICHAEL

He chooses Nina and I nearly kicked in the set.

Nina? I mean, she instantly started telling him how to design her Bohemian Chic with Splashes of Color Condo, until Michael turned to Courtland and begged to be held. Then he snapped to, and cut a bitch down to size, and Nina, for the rest of the show, played nicely.

Michael sets up his opening intro shot, where he arrives at Nina's "new" apartment to have their consultation. He is nothing but Phony Homo. He tells her that she's a beautiful girl, and even Nina looks shocked to hear it. Then he says, or at least i thought he said, "Too bad your voice is so tragic."

Turns out that he actually said, "Too bad your place is so tragic."

Yeah, neither line is really HGTV host material.

Michael only truly seems natural and at ease on camera when he's dealing with his longtime "friend" Courtland. They have that natural rapport of, well, not lovers, but of gay men and the straight men who love them while they pretend they have a fiancee back home named Dina.

In case I haven't made it clear: Courtland is queer, dear, he may just not know it yet.

But still, the scenes of he and Michael with the powertools is fun and informative, and just slightly erotic. I expect them to have their own show, on pay-per-view.

When Michael brings in Nina to show her the "new" condo, she goes as over-the-top as her design aesthetic. Wow! WOW! WOW!!! But it is kind of a wow. The curvy partition Michael's lover built to hide the curtain that divides the living space and the bedroom, is very cool very feminine, and very Nina. It's not exactly Bohemian Chic, what with the emphasis on Blacks and Whites and Pinks, which makes it more Good'n'Plenty Chic, but it looks like Nina.

Especially the large piece of art Michael had Nina make to keep her busy and out of his hair.

EMILY
She opts for Dan, and begins to sift through his wardrobe because her show will be called Style to Lifestyle, and she will use her clients own personal style to design a room.

It's a nice idea, until you realize that by picking Dan she picks flannel and denim, and unless she wants to spend the rest of her life designing cabins in Montana, she should rethink.

And she does.

Dan is kicked to the curb, and Martini-Making-Mad-Men-Stud-Muffin Tom will be the client.
Emily looks through Tom's clothes. I personally, would have made him strip off the suit he was wearing and stand before me nude whilst I look over his clothes, but perhaps that's a different show: Porn Star!

Emily goes for the Tom blues and grays and pinstripes and Rolex and cuff links, and I must say that I'm beginning to like her show idea.

The director of their Little Show arrives to film the intro, where Emily "meets" Tom for the first time, and Emily is chewing up her words and spitting them out randomly. I wait for Tom to grab her by the shoulders, slap her, and then order a scotch, but Emily finally pulls it together.

Emily brings Tom in for the Close-Your-Eyes-Then-POW reveal, and the room she designed is very cool. I don't look, dress or act like Tom, but that's a condo I could move into right away. The pinstriped wall are fantastic [Note to Carlos: expect some pinstriping somewhere in Casa Smallvile] and the color palette is very rich and luxurious and masculine and, well, Tom.

JUDGEMENT

In the judges chamber, The Witches Of HGTV await, along with an audience that applauds too heartily and too long. It sounds a s fake as some of Michael's intro's.

The Judges announce that they will be looking at each FINAL TWO'er's completed segments and Michael is up first.

He's cute. He's funny. He's stiff. But he's stiff with Nina and funny with Courtland, when I thought it should have gone the other way. But his show moves along at a nice clip, and it's informative, somewhat, and he does show how he repurposes a few of the items he found in the space as well as reusing Nina's grandmother's mirror.

But, and this is where Michael bugs me, that little lean forward thing he does to the camera while talking, you know, where he also kicks up his leg? Yeah, that's annoying. It's a little too precious and forced. Truth be told, and all homosexual innuendo ["in you endo" hehee] aside, the moments with Courtland seemed the most real and genuine; the rest seemed a bit hosty-phony.

Emily talks a lot, and the bit where she runs around the fabric store looks a little Three Stooges to me. But, I will say this about Emily's segment, we seemed to get a lot more information from her about her client, her design, her execution and her style.

THE DECISION

Mini-Me announces that it is the toughest decision they've ever made [Standard Reality Show Line # 4], but he does like Emily's originality, and how her show idea really came through. Candice loves Emily’s ease with hosting. Genvieve nods and wonders if she has the key to the hotel room that the HGTV exec gave her.

But she snaps out of it long enough to say that Michael's hosting skills have greatly improved [read: less gay], but she wonders if he's being real. Vern thinks Michael has done some amazing designs from the beginning straight to the end. Candice is ordering take-out.

After much deliberation, the Witches have reached a decision….and the Next Design Star--who, if you listen closely will not have their own show, but their own special...is Emily.

I was okay with this.

Michael, for me, you know, was cuter, but Emily's room was gorgeous. If she can really pull off the whole Life to Lifestyle theme, she might make a nice HGTV series.

There you have it, kids, after weeks and weeks and weeks of boring basket challenges and inspiration challenges, we have a winner. But the loser Is The audience, because we didn't get to really see any designers style until the last two challenges.

So, HGTV, again, I'm begging, if this trainwreck comes back next year, listen up:

1. Lose Vern. He doesn't even have a regular show on HGTV. He just hosts other shows, so i don't see how he can judge a design show.
2. Lose Genvieve because she truly is an awful designer and her stage presence, or lack there-of, is annoying beyond compare.
3. Keep Candice, because she's the only one of the three who actually is a designer and hosts her own fabulous show.
4. Maybe hire David Bromstad, the original Design Star. He'd be a good judge because he's been through the process, he has his own show, and he doesn't mind telling it like it is.
5. Make the third judges seat a rotating one, and bring in hosts from all HGTV shows to add their two-cents.
6. No.More.Group.Challenges. I mean, seriously, Alex was okay, but he won a challenge the week he made a f***ing pillow. Seriously.
7. No more inspirations. Give them a space or a chair or a wall or a patio and tell them what their client wants and let them design.

If you can do these simple things, I'll be switching over to pay-per-view, and looking for Michale and Courtland and the PowerTools.