Emmy Awards Fug Carpet: Elizabeth Perkins

There’s a fairly painful commercial running right now for Martha Stewart’s new line of stuff — obviously not effective, since I can’t remember what store it’s being sold at — in which Tim Gunn is eagerly holding up bedsheets to a woman’s body and crowing about what awesome fabric it is for a dress. And of course Martha has to stroll up and look at him like he’s an escaped mental patient, separating him from his poor victim by dragging him off to kitchenwares and rolling her eyes that maybe he’ll get ideas for hats from her pots and pans. And wacky ol’ Tim trots on after her, cooing about how much he loves hats. While we all sympathize with that in this post-Dynasty era of humorless millinery, the commercial makes me yearn for the days when people didn’t ask Tim Gunn to do anything beyond Project Runway, because I feel like he’s too polite to say no when everyone loves him so much, and that’s what leads to ads like that.

Elizabeth Perkins, though, has made me wonder if the ad is more of a documentary than I realized.

The longer I frowned at this picture, the clearer it became: This is what you’d get if someone asked Silly Ad Version Of Tim Gunn to make an Emmy dress for Ma Ingalls using only what he can find in Martha Stewart’s kitchen collection. Even Elizabeth seems vaguely hacked off that she’s wearing a tablecloth, as if a photographer just asked her whether the coordinating napkins are sold separately.