Deadline reports that Showtime is developing a comedy executive produced by Delia Ephron (You’ve Got Mail) about the first black TV model to be featured on a major game show in 1990. Aptly titled 36-24-36—what some consider the ideal measurements for a female model—the show will offer “celebrity and glamour collid[ing] with sexual harassment, racism, misogyny, homophobia, bulimia, and job insecurity, for the four gorgeous models on the No. 1 game show of the ’90s.” Add ridiculously uncomfortable high heels to the mix, and this sounds less like a comedy and more like a Black Swan-level waking nightmare.
Now, you might be wondering if this particular ’90s game show typically closed with a seemingly inoffensive old man with a pencil-thin microphone telling viewers to have their pets spayed or neutered. Considering that Kathleen Bradley, the first full-time black model on The Price Is Right, is serving as a consultant for the comedy (a job where she can wear whatever shoes she damn well pleases), it appears that the show is going to lampoon the so-called “Barker’s Beauties,” or at least the male producers measuring their waistlines and threatening to fire them if they go near the snack cart.
In fact, Bradley was one of several models dismissed from the show following their testimonies during Barker’s failed lawsuit against fellow model Holly Halstrom, so look for the series to cover similar ground eventually. Sure, it’s unlikely that there will actually be a Bob Barker character on the show, but if you see a white-haired proxy gesturing to a “fictional” game called “Blinko,” the point will have been made.