Ellen Gray: Lifetime gives us Chanel, in flashbacks

COCO CHANEL. 8 p.m. Saturday, Lifetime.

IT'S PROBABLY just as well Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel didn't live to see "Project Runway."

Because someone sooner or later would have asked her to judge it. And it's hard to imagine the woman who gave the world the little black dress sitting still for a Heidi Klum or Nina Garcia pronouncing on the relative merits of outfits assembled from grocery store items or designed for drag queens.

Still, fashion's fashion, and Lifetime, which snatched the unscripted hit out from under Bravo's very nose and had planned to start airing Season 6 this fall, no doubt saw a solid gold tie-in in this weekend's "Coco Chanel."

"Runway's" Lifetime debut's since been moved to early next year, but Chanel's show goes on.

A three-hour film starring Shirley MacLaine as the fashion icon, circa 1954, and Barbora Bobulova as her younger, pioneering incarnation, it's said to be "freely inspired by the life of Coco Chanel."

Which is to say they've left out a lot. And maybe dressed an incident or two in more Lifetime-friendly hues.

MacLaine, who apparently decided not to bother to attempt a French accent, isn't served well by a script that essentially has her introducing flashbacks.

"Did I ever tell you how the little black dress came about? Did I ever tell you?" she asks Malcolm McDowell, who's playing a business associate whose connection to Chanel doesn't seem to have been considered interesting enough to have made the flashbacks (and whose character may be a composite, anyway).

And then it's off to the races for Bobulova, a Slovak actress who's every bit as charming as I expect Audrey Tatou will be in the film she's making about Chanel.

Like any true Lifetime heroine, this one has a difficult, and occasionally tragic, love life, one that, when she's not lying around in bed looking wistful, moves the plot along nicely: See Coco bounce back from one heartbreak to launch her first business, from another to bob her hair and design a dress that will become a classic outfit.

Reports of later liaisons - with the Duke of Westminster, who's said to have wanted to marry her, and more controversially, with a Nazi officer during World War II - go unmentioned, but perhaps those breakups produced no meaningful moments in fashion?

History Channel fans might scratch their heads over the juxtaposition of the First World War and Chanel's discovery that plain old wool jersey could be used for something other than men's undergarments, but it's a development that gets the attention it deserves, given its effect not only on women's silhouettes but on their freedom of movement.

By contrast, "Coco Chanel" skips lightly over other milestones - the development of her signature perfume, Chanel No. 5, merits only a few lines - choosing to focus instead on the all-too-complicated personal life of a woman whose greatest gift to other women may have been a taste for simplicity.

Though only about 3.3 million tuned in for the second episode of the CW's "90210" - down more than a million viewers from last week's two-hour premiere - it remained the No. 1 show for the hour in at least one key demographic: 18- to 34-year-old women, according to the preliminary Nielsens.

Though only about 3.3 million tuned in for the second episode of the CW's "90210" - down more than a million viewers from last week's two-hour premiere - it remained the No. 1 show for the hour in at least one key demographic: 18- to 34-year-old women, according to the preliminary Nielsens.

Tuesday's premiere of Fox's "Fringe," meanwhile, averaged 9 million viewers, putting it second only to NBC's "America's Got Talent" in total viewers and winning its time slot among men 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.