The E! network says no decisions have been made about the future of Fashion Police in the wake of Joan Rivers’s death.
The network said in a statement that its “mourning our beloved Joan, and will respond at a later date with further programming updates”. Rivers’s daughter, Melissa Rivers, is its executive producer.
Rivers died Thursday at 81 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. She was hospitalised on August 28 after going into cardiac arrest in a doctor’s office following a routine procedure.
“She’s been a much beloved member of the E! family for over 20 years and the world is less funny without her in it,” the network said. “Today, our hearts are heavy knowing Joan will not be bounding through the doors.”
E! previously said the long-running programme, which normally airs new episodes on Fridays, will be on break for the next two weeks. In its place, the network plans to air two special programmes focusing on New York Fashion Week.
Her initial reaction to doing Fashion Police was another example of Rivers taking on risky assignments.
“I didn’t want to do Fashion Police because I thought, ‘This is stupid, this is beneath me, who wants to talk about fashion?’ “ she recalled in an interview, while noting the success of the gambit. “It has taken off. We are the No 1 show in England on E! Who knew? I try everything.”
Much of her comedy centred around deprecating her own looks, although she famously did everything she could to look youthful and glamorous.
“I’ve had so much plastic surgery that when I die they’ll donate my body to Tupperware,” she cracked.
She was just as hard on the celebrities whose looks she critiqued.
“Her observations are so merciless and her timing so precise that even if you like that person, you laugh. She is a sadist of comedy, unafraid to be cruel — even too cruel,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote in a 2010 review of Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, a documentary about a year in the comedian’s life.
But in 2014, her sense of humour is sometimes at odds with the Young Hollywood set,” my Los Angeles Times colleague Amy Kaufman wrote in July. “Jennifer Lawrence has publicly lamented how Fashion Police teaches the young ‘that it’s OK to point at people and call them ugly and call them fat.’”
“Rivers exists to bedevil celebrities,” Daniel D’Addario wrote in a critique for Salon last year. “To her dubious credit, she more or less invented modern, fashion-obsessed red carpet coverage at awards shows. Her shtick is praising the stars on occasion for good red-carpet ensembles but tearing them down when they set a foot wrong, a critique that has nothing to do with anything but Rivers’s aesthetic judgment. Hey, sometimes stars really do look silly in their frocks. But they’re also people promoting their work. Rivers’s critique is perpetually skin-deep.”
For Rivers, who was also called TV’s most honest fashion critic, her comments were all about being candid — and getting a laugh.
She stormed out of an interview with CNN’s Fredericka Whitfield in July after Whitfield described Rivers’s Fashion Police commentary as “very mean in some ways.”
“It’s not mean, it’s not mean, it’s not mean. I tell the truth,” Rivers said before she walked out. “I’m sure I say the same things that all the viewers say to their friends sitting next to them on the couch.”
“I love it because I don’t have to stand on the red carpet and pretend I like something — it goes against everything I believe in — and smile and say, ‘Don’t you look nice?’ and the next day, say she looked terrible. So I’d rather not have to do the first part,” she told writer Archana Ram in Enertainment Weekly shortly before Fashion Police debuted as a weekly series in September 2010.
“I love fashion. I have my own jewelry/fashion line on QVC. All my summer jobs were in fashion,” she said in the Entertainment Weekly interview. “I just love fashion, so for me it’s a joy and a pleasure to be there to critique it.”
And while some found her comments mean, many wanted to hear what Rivers had to say. Fashion Police reached 10 million viewers worldwide with its weekly shows and awards season specials, according to the network.
And, in the modern medium for judging success, Rivers had 2.16 million Twitter followers.
