Lifetime Television

Our favorite Ma, Estelle Getty of the Golden Girls, passed away yesterday from a progressive brain disease. We've been keeping track of various homages to the "tart-tongued" Sophia on the original GG. Lifetime announced today that they will honor her with a 10-episode marathon of Ms. Getty's most memorable performances on Golden Girls starting at noon on Friday. Set your DVR. Or you can check out some golden YouTube picks over at The House Next Door blog (link via Art Fag City).

Here's more from other publications:

"When she auditioned, Getty was appearing in Hollywood as the carping Jewish mother in Harvey Fierstein's 'Torch Song Trilogy.' In her early 60s, she flunked her Golden Girls test twice because she didn't look old enough. "I could understand that," she told an interviewer a year after the show debuted. "I walk fast, I move fast, I talk fast." She came prepared for the third audition, wearing dowdy clothes and telling the makeup artist, "To you this is just a job. To me it's my entire career down the toilet unless you make me look 80." The artist did, Getty got the job and won two Emmys" [Associated Press obit]  read more »

When Lifetime announced in early April that it had managed to yank Project Runway, for $150 million, from its longtime home on Bravo, the only people who seemed happy about the deal were Harvey Weinstein, Project Runway’s producer, whose production company will now get paid $1 million per episode instead of the $600,000 he was making at Bravo; and Lifetime, which saw the deal as the potential cornerstone of a massive rebranding effort. But nearly everyone else, it seemed, was not thrilled. The network better known for showing Golden Girls reruns and made-for-TV movies that usually involved some combination of a woman being stalked, a serial killer and/or a cheating/abusive husband was, not to put too fine a point on it, simply too Middle America for Project Runway fans.

“The thing that concerns us is that they talk about the show in terms of it being a women’s show,” said Tom Fitzgerald, 41, one-half of the blogging team behind the popular Project Rungay blog, which obsessively chronicles every episode as well as any and all behind-the-scenes gossip. “And we’re living proof that that’s not entirely the case. It has a very large gay viewership. It has a very large straight viewership that likes the fact that it’s an urban, intelligent, creative reality show. Our hope is that they don’t forget that.”  read more »

What will happen on primary day if 50 percent of the women voters of New Hampshire are still undecided this weekend?

On Saturday morning, Lifetime Television convened a meeting of local women. At the end of a program of speakers that included Martha Burk (of Augusta National Golf Club protests fame), who is currently serving as Bill Richardson's senior adviser for women's issues, the
audience took part in a straw poll.

Though the results for actual candidates were all over the map and were therefore not released--Lifetime wanted to stress that they did not consider this a terribly scientific poll--they did tell me that a full 50 percent of the 100 or so women present declared themselves undecided.

In the audience was Laura Fink, 31, of Londonderry, NH. "First I was Hillary, then I said I don't like her stance on some things. Then I met Obama. He reminds me of Howard Dean: young, fresh. I hope the media doesn't do the same thing to him," she said.

Her meeting with Obama was back in early September, and she's still committed to him--she had been canvassing for him that week. "He's very friendly. There's a toughness about Hillary, but he's so gentle. And he has a heart," she said. "We want someone to listen to us."  read more »