Is Tim Gunn turning ‘Project Runway’ into a soap opera?

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Is Tim Gunn getting just a little too fierce? Once Project Runway‘s mother hen, Mr. Make-It-Work has turned diva-ward: Rumor has it Lifetime producers were upset by a recent video Gunn posted on Facebook, in which he complained about the strange premise of a ‘Project Runway’ challenge, dished on the behind-the-scenes production disasters and admitted that a segment producer ‘basically threw up her hands in frustration with me.’ Gunn eventually yanked the video from his page. (“There was a hurtful reaction to a couple of things I said, and that really concerned me,” Gunn told the New York Post onThursday. “That was never my intention. I thought, ‘Let me just take this down.’ Lifetime had nothing to do with it. I did it completely on my own.”)

But this is not new behavior for Gunn, who has called Vogue “a monkey house,” insisted that Isaac Mizrahi was ‘a terrible, terrible person,’ requested a DNA test to verify that the ‘Real Housewives of New Jersey’ were not, in fact, “wild animals,’ disparaged Anna Wintour (who he claimed forced her assistants to carry her down the stairs at a Peter Som show in 2006) and ripped Taylor Momsen (“She was pathetic!’ he scoffed of the actress’ behavior on the set of ‘Gossip Girl.’ ‘She couldn’t remember her lines,’ he said, ‘and she didn’t even have that many’).

And yet, what’s bad for Momsen is great for Gunn’s show: In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, Jon Caramanica argues that Gunn is turning ‘Project Runway’ into a dramatic soap opera -- and that’s made this season the best in recent years.

-- Melissa Maerz

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