The Homos look at Promos

So we're watching Shear Genius last night and one after another, the Bravo promos for Season 5 of PR come up. We'd seen them before but not all of them in one night. Take a look:

Notice anything? Or rather, the lack of anything? Not so much as a glimpse of this coming season's crop of designers. It's nothing but a series of greatest hits clips. What's up with that?

What with all the sturm und drang in the press regarding the show's move to Lifetime, maybe it makes sense for Bravo to take a look back at what they've wrought. Sort of a hale and farewell as the show moves out of the neighborhood.

On the other hand, there's something about the whole thing that leaves us a bit uneasy. Sure, the show's moving on, but for the moment it's still Bravo's baby and in the past, their methods of promoting upcoming seasons were wildly different. Just last season they mounted a runway show in Lincoln Center a couple weeks before the season started to promote the designers. At the very least, there are usually pages and pages of bios and videos on the Bravo site at this point. This year? Nothing.

So. Let's start with the baseless speculation, shall we?

Theory 1, The Freakshow: Obviously, this is not what Bravo wanted for the show. Since they had a very narrow window in which to get a season up and running before it moved on, we wonder about the level of contestant they managed to get. Are they such a batch of freaks that Bravo doesn't know how to promote them? Granted, that would certainly make our blogging a lot more fun (and easier - you have no idea how hard it was to wring jokes out of some of those wet blankets from S4).

Theory 2, Money, Money, Money: Look at it from Bravo's point of view. The Weinsteins really dicked them over. Why should they spend money promoting a brand that's fleeing to another network? It could well be that they're just finishing out their contract and not putting much effort into it. We can't blame them for that, but we really hope that's not the case.

Theory 3, A Brilliant Marketing Plan: Maybe with all the fevered attention the show's received in the press since the announcement of the Lifetime deal, they're taking a more mysterioso approach in order to keep the interest high. We kind of doubt this one because if that was the case, the promos would be more along the lines of "You won't believe what's coming" instead of "Hey, look how cool we once were."

Theory 4, We're Talking Out Our Asses: For all we know, we'll be receiving a flood of promotional materials any day now and everything we've said up until now will be revealed as bullshit. It's possible. Still, they never promoted previous seasons like this.

[Videos: Bravotv.com]