Ellen Gray | Gunn's 'Guide' sticks to usual makeover show format

TIM GUNN'S GUIDE TO STYLE. 10 tonight, Bravo.

I CAN'T TELL you exactly what I was wearing when I met Tim Gunn.

But since I was then six days into a 17-day business trip to L.A., I'm pretty sure I chose it because it was warm - to ward off the chill in a hotel ballroom whose air-conditioning had been set to "arctic" - and because I hadn't yet spilled anything on it.

So when I say that Bravo's "Project Runway" is one of my favorite shows and that Gunn, who plays Dutch uncle to the design contestants, is my favorite thing about it, you'll know it's not my exquisite fashion sense talking.

I just love people who love what they do and are good at it, especially those who know how to share that love with the less fortunate among us.

That doesn't mean Gunn doesn't scare me a little.

The former Parsons fashion design chairman, who recently became chief creative officer at Liz Claiborne, had just spoken somewhat disparagingly to a roomful of reporters about how some members of Congress he'd encountered while testifying in favor of the Design Piracy Prohibition Act had been dressed.

The word "schlump" was used.

Conscious that he hadn't used it in an enthusiastic way, I wasn't looking for a review of my own outfit, which might have invited further forays into Yiddish pejoratives, so I quickly apologized for not being dressed even as well as a congresswoman.

"That's not true," he assured me, suggesting that a) members of Congress dress even worse than I'd thought; or b) that Tim Gunn is a very polite man.

Let's go with b, shall we?

If I were as polite as he, I might refrain from talking too much about Gunn's new Bravo show, "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style," but then I wouldn't be a TV critic.

And might actually have to dress better.

Ostensibly based on Gunn's chatty and fairly fabulous new book, "A Guide to Quality, Taste & Style," the Bravo series, which pairs the style guru with supermodel Veronica Webb, owes much - perhaps a bit too much - to "What Not to Wear" (the BBC America one, at least, since I never watch TLC's version).

If you've seen the show, indeed any makeover show, you'll be able to count the beats: the closet cleanout, the shopping spree, the lecture during the shopping spree, the emotional tug-of-war, the big reveal.

Oh, and don't forget the tears.

"Guide to Style" adds in some over-the-top product placement in the form of gifts to the participants and a designer dress, and focuses the shopping on the book's list of 10 wardrobe basics, but even Gunn acknowledges there's nothing new under the sun.

"It's undeniably a makeover show. I wouldn't pretend to say that it isn't, just as my book is undeniably an iteration of a makeover book," he'd said during the press conference when I alluded to the show's similarity to "What Not to Wear."

The difference, of course, is Gunn himself, an educator who uses words like "iteration" - and even "semiology" (the study of symbols) - as elegantly as he wears his suits.

For that, I can forgive him his use tonight of the word "journey" - possibly the most overused euphemism in "reality" television - as he strikes a "contract" with contestant Rebecca Pennino, whose jeans-and-tops wardrobe has him a bit more worked up than we're used to seeing him.

In "Runway" - which thankfully will be back later this year - Gunn made a place for himself in a format that hadn't previously included anyone quite like him, and he did it with both style and subtlety.

In "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style," it feels as if he's sometimes forcing himself to emote for the cameras.

Webb, though a bit goddesslike, is a better fit with Gunn than "Runway's" uber-bore, Heidi Klum, might have been.

But if Webb's lines aren't scripted, they feel scripted.

"She's in a rut," Gunn declares of their subject, as Webb responds, "That rut is so deep there's magma down there."

She might just as easily have been talking about makeover TV, stuck in a rut so deep it may take more than Tim Gunn to dig it out.

Even if you've never watched a single episode of "Dr. Who," a sci-fi series that's been around, in one incarnation or another, longer than many of its fans, you might want to check out its entertaining new spin-off, "Torchwood," which premieres on BBC America at 9 p.m. Saturday.

John Barrowman stars as Captain Jack Harkness, who's in the business of saving the world from aliens (or something like that).

Less importantly, Barrowman, who was born in Scotland but raised here, is part of a big, fat fall TV trend in which British actors pretend to be Americans.

No one's going to save us from them.

But when you see some of them (Barrowman included), you might not care. *

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