14 DAY TRIAL // E! thought that Fashion Police could survive Joan Rivers’ death last year with only minor modifications. So they brought Kathy Griffin as a sort of “replacement” for the late show veteran / established comedienne, and hoped for the best.
Things took a turn for the worst after the Oscars in February, when Giuliana Rancic made what was interpreted as a racist joke about Zendaya Coleman’s hair. Shortly afterwards, Kelly Osbourne and Kathy either left on their own or they were fired, and sometime later, Fashion Police was put on a hiatus until a new formula for it could be devised.
Melissa Rivers has a few thoughts on the debacle.
Kathy Griffin disrespected Joan Rivers’ legacy
Speaking with Hoda Kotb at a special chat at the 92nd Y in NYC, Melissa gets candid on how she felt to see Fashion Police fall apart like that - and in such a public manner, no less. You can see the full interview in the video below, but *please be advised that some discretion is recommended while viewing it because of graphic language that might offend.
At around the 17-minute mark, Melissa concedes that Fashion Police came back too soon after Joan’s death and that the solution she and the other producers came up with wasn’t a good one. They hoped to patch things up and expected the program to run the same as before, when that wasn’t even possible in the first place: you can’t have the show function without its “matriarch.”
So when she saw that things weren’t working out, Melissa felt as if her mother’s legacy was being torn apart, she explains. She took it very personally. Here were all these people “out of control” (she includes Zendaya here), and they were smashing to pieces “this little jewel.”
But no one wronged the late Joan more than Kathy Griffin, who, in her statement announcing the departure, called the show old-fashioned and mean, and not even real comedy to begin with.
“My biggest complaint was the feeling that she kind of [expletive] all over my mother’s legacy in her statement on leaving. And I know that was not an intentional reading of it, but that’s how I felt... by calling the comedy and the style of it old-fashioned. It was like, I understand what you were doing, you’re trying to save yourself, but don’t crap all over my mother to do it,” Melissa says.
She continues to say that Joan would probably be amused and frustrated at the mess everyone made of Fashion Police after she was gone. She’s right on that account.
Fashion Police will survive, one way or another
Fashion Police will return on the air sometime next year, with Melissa saying that she and the other producers have just started meeting to toss around ideas on how it might be revamped post-Joan.
As of the time of writing, not even Giuliana’s return is guaranteed, though she did say recently that she would be coming back.
Melissa and E! are positive that the show will survive this year’s more or less unnecessary drama. After all, this is the show that made the red carpet at all the major events into an event in and of itself, launching countless copies on other networks. How could it not survive?
