Joan & Melissa an Embarrassment

Joan Rivers’ new reality show on WE, Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?, follows the 77-year-old comedian as she moves in with her daughter in Los Angeles. It’s as artificial as the botox Rivers extols:

• The show is “upsetting,” writes a pained Linda Stasi in the New York Post. From pushing her daughter to pose nude to giving “away all of her living room furniture,” “it's all so wrong that as much as I love her, I have to say, in this case, ‘Joan Knows Worst.’”

• In the Washington Post, Hank Steuver calls it “ yet another feeble attempt to extract compelling reality TV from a contrived day-in-the-lives-of-showfolk premise,” based on “just a speck of an idea.”
• But Alessandra Stanley notes that “Ms. Rivers is, even in this silly imposture, very funny.” Still, she writes in the New York Times, “the whole premise disguises the insecurity that prevents Ms. Rivers from fully enjoying her success.”