The Chair, Making the Cut, and new celeb coupling dropped

Academia and fashion, plus Zoë x Channing

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Aug 24, 2021

Hello!

On this week’s episode of Criticism Is Dead, we discuss The Chair and Making the Cut, two shows about making it work within an ultimately capitalist institution (lol)

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02:35 The Chair, a new Netflix miniseries, does a good job showcasing how an institution like a university cannot easily be changed, but rather changes the individual.

To start out with, SANDRA OH!!! She’s great in this, playing an English professor-turned-department chair who is suddenly saddled wth a myriad of problems to fix as the first non-white woman in her new position. Academia is a funny bubble, fraught with dramas and conflicts that are both inconsequential and hugely significant, given the university’s role in society. Here we see a ton of contemporary issues surface: race, womanhood, motherhood, education, “cancel culture,” and ultimately the compromises one has to make when in positions of marginal power while still being subject to larger forces.

It’s a jam-packed six episodes (only half an hour each), to the point where sometimes you might wish the show could slow down a little or better distribute the load with another episode, but ultimately a nice one-sitting watch with humor, pathos, and an admirable gameness to attempt to take on hot-button issues. Watch it for that, for Oh, for the setting, and definitely for the wardrobe.

22:38 Making the Cut is Amazon’s high-budget answer to Project Runway, only even more rooted in the naked goal of commercial profit.

With two seasons now under its belt, Making the Cut still has not quite found its stride. The problems are multifold, especially as illustrated by the latest season, which had fewer designers, fewer impressive designers, fewer judges, fewer qualified judges, and fewer of the flourishes that made the first season at least garishly fascinating. (This could be partly attributed to the fact that S2 was filmed during the pandemic, so maybe we should allow some leeway.)

But the biggest problem has nothing to do with the pandemic. As a 2020 Vanity Fair review spells out, the problem is that this show is utterly corporate. The money at stake ($1,000,000), the constant Amazon Fashion integration, the emphasis on the winner being whoever can become “the next global brand” rather than just a gifted designer — these all contribute to this feeling of soullessness and a weird tension between the criteria of creative design and commercial design (and it’s the latter that’s going to win out, ultimately).

As far as the fashion competition reality TV show landscape goes, we recommend Netflix’s Next in Fashion (sadly canceled after one season) if you’re interested in some great looks.