E!’s Fashion Police may have recently lost its brightest—and most delightfully vicious—star with the death of comedian Joan Rivers, but the show’s duty is too important to let a tragic event like that stop it. That’s why the network has announced that it will—unsurprisingly—continue the show without her. This comes via Deadline, which reports that the E! network has released a statement saying that, since her death, it has “thought long and hard about what Joan would have wanted as it pertains to the future of Fashion Police.” Now, after a respectful two-week waiting period, E! has determined that she would have wanted it to go on, and with the blessing of Joan’s daughter Melissa, it will do just that.
Fashion Police will come back on January 12 of next year with an episode about The Golden Globes, but the network isn’t ready to make any announcements other than that. This leaves the question of who will take her place unanswered, assuming that someone does. Since Fashion Police is a show entirely based around criticizing celebrities and their fashion choices, having someone like Joan Rivers on its panel was easily its greatest strength, but the problem now is that there are very few people out there who could pull off a Rivers-like shtick without coming across as a shameless imitator. Presumably, E! wouldn’t have decided to do this if it didn’t have something in mind, so we’ll just have to wait until The Golden Globes to see how it goes. We could always just make fun of celebrities’ clothes on our own, if it comes to that.