When you work for a web magazine which has trumpeted itself as “The Guys’ Portal to the Web,” you have to learn that, despite your best intentions of covering a diverse amount of TV-DVD releases, your bosses aren’t always going to be as enthusiastic about your review picks as you are. After having suffered through a slight chastising over my decision to praise “Blossom: Seasons 1 and 2” on Bullz-Eye, it seemed like a wise move to avoid an argument and just do my review of “Designing Women: The Complete Series” over on Premium Hollywood instead. This is, after all, practically the antithesis of what the average Bullz-Eye reader would be watching…and given how many times the episodes have been rerun on the Lifetime Network over the years, one wonders if even the show’s fans really need to own it on DVD. (That’s a joke, of course: “Designing Women” fans have been clamoring for the show to come to DVD for years, so you can only imagine their excitement.)
The back of the box boldly declares that the cast members of “Designing Women” – Delta Burke, Dixie Carter, Annie Potts, and Jean Smart – “brought a new kind of Southern spirit to American television. Smart, ambitious, and outspoken, they embodied the ‘new’ Southern woman.” That’s as may be, but it doesn’t feel terribly groundbreaking…and if you check your ’80s sitcom timeline, it’s pretty obvious that CBS’s interest in picking up the show stemmed from a desire to entice some of the women who were watching NBC’s “The Golden Girls.” To be fair, however, creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason devised the show mostly because she wanted to see the four actresses, each of whom had worked with her in the past, teamed up in a show together.
“Designing Women: The Complete First Season” might as well cause estrogen to come billowing forth from your DVD player, so much is it geared toward the fairer sex. Not that that isn’t to be expected from a show with a title like that, but it really needs to be underlined, lest any guys find their girlfriends or wives asking them if they’d like to check out the set with them. God help you if you end up in such a position, but if you do, then you can at least request that you watch the following episodes, which have solid guest stars: “Design House” (Stephen Tobolowsky), “Grand Slam, Thank You, Ma’am” (Gregg Henry), “I Do, I Don’t” and “Reese’s Friend” (you can never go wrong when Hal Holbrook turns up), and the two-parter entitled “Old Spouses Never Die,” which features Michael Jeter and Scott Bakula. There’s also the occasional saving grace of Meshach Taylor, who pops up as ex-con Anthony Bouvier once in awhile, but he’s not a regular in this season, so he’s certainly not around every episode.
Lastly, if you are a fan of the show but you can’t imagine any need to actually own the set (seriously, every episode must’ve been aired on Lifetime at least a thousand times), you might be swayed into a purchase by “Designing Women: A Reunion,” a 36-minute retrospective of the show which took place at the Paley Center for Media in 2006. Taylor is conspicuous in his absence, but it’s nice to see Burke, Carter, Potts, and Smart together again, along with Bloodworth-Thomason, as they discuss the legacy of the show.
