Latest entry into chick TV:
CosmoTV launches with its focus on love and sex


canadianpressgoogle.com
February the 13th, 2008

TORONTO - Anyone mourning the absence of "Sex and The City" on the TV dial will have a new best friend forever in CosmoTV, a specialty channel based on the iconic Cosmopolitan magazine and inspired by its focus on love and sex.

Canada's CosmoTV, a collaboration between Corus Entertainment and Hearst Corp., the magazine's publisher, is launching Thursday night - Valentine's Day, for those who pay attention to such Hallmark mega-events.

It's the first English-language version of the channel in the world, and it bills itself as offering "fun, flirty and irreverent entertainment for women."

But with its focus on men - meeting them, landing them, sexually satisfying them, keeping them carnally enthralled, convincing them to commit, ensuring they'll never stray - CosmoTV makes the "Sex and the City" girls seem utterly indifferent to the opposite sex.

Like its magazine inspiration, many of the offerings on the channel are focused on the pursuit of men in ways that seem a startling throwback to another era. Have women really travelled such short distances over the years? Is snagging a man really consuming women to this extent?

Josie Dye, the 29-year-old host of the channel's flagship show, "Oh So Cosmo," is unapologetic about the landing-a-man focus of CosmoTV.

"I don't care how smart of a woman you are, I don't care if you have a law degree or if you're a doctor - eventually people want to fall in love because that's what life is all about. And Cosmo just helps you do it in a fun way."

One of the first items on her news magazine-style show, in fact, is about good places to meet men in Canada, Dye says as she gets her hair styled at a west-end salon amid a blustery winter blizzard.

"My first story is about picking up men in Canada - here are great places you can go to actually meet men," Dye says.

"The show is really just like Cosmo magazine. I do different quizzes about things like food in the bedroom, body language, and trying to figure out a man and what it means, for example, when he's looking above your head while he's talking to you. And it works. All that stuff works. Now I pay attention to a man and if he's looking over my head, I know he's lying."

If that's not Carrie Bradshaw enough for viewers, uncut "Sex and the City" marathons will be a staple of the channel, as will shows like "Dirty Cows," a British show hosted by English blueblood Tara Palmer-Tomkinson that features a group of beautiful girls vying to be the girlfriend of a wealthy Cornish farmer.

Almost refreshing in their departure from the man chase are shows like "Abbey and Janice," a six-part series about "Britain's Next Top Model" winner Abbie Clancy and her attempt to break her into the American modelling world with the help of the irascible Janice Dickinson, and "The Agency," a series that follows bookers from the top-flight Wilhelmina modelling agency.

There are also reruns of some female-centric shows like "Felicity" and "Veronica Mars" and movies that include '80s classics like "Pretty in Pink," "Say Anything" and "Flashdance."

Dye, who's also a deejay at Toronto radio station 102.1 The Edge, insists that CosmoTV has something for every woman.

"The typical Cosmo girl has a life. The Cosmo Girl loves issues, she loves to talk about Canadian politics and environmental issues - those are the Cosmo girl's issues. But who's going to say they don't talk about men? Young women do," she says.

"I am working two jobs right now and I'm hoping to have an incredible career, but at the same time, I'm not going to lie to anybody - I talk about sex on Friday, Saturday nights and on Monday, Tuesday nights as well. When you're hanging out with your girlfriends and there's martinis around, the one thing we do is talk about guys. It's fun, it's fearless."


http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5g39fEGAW-3QWIENU_h0q_YiExZLw