E!'s New Plastic Surgery Show Good Work Isn't As Bad As It Should Be

On Tuesday night after Botched, E! debuted a new series called Good Work, hosted by RuPaul and featuring Botched surgeon Dr. Terry Dubrow. Its mission is to analyze and critique alleged celebrity plastic surgery. It could’ve been an utter disaster.

It wasn’t. The show idea itself—publicly dissecting celebrity faces and bodies, overwhelmingly women in this case—is inherently crude, risky and could easily earn the same mean-spirited tag as Fashion Police. In the wrong hands, it’s an offensive shitshow. However, E! was canny enough to select a host like RuPaul, who comes off as gracious, sharp-witted and not after blood.

You can tell they’d rather play softball than be nasty about it, but even with the show’s veiled intentions, RuPaul delivered enough RuPaulian zingers and sexual innuendo to lighten the mood and make it interesting. Chances are, I wouldn’t watch this if RuPaul wasn’t hosting.

During last night’s episode, Dr. Dubrow steered clear of confirming any celebrity procedures (he instead used the conditional “if”). Like he said in our interview
, “We do chat about celebrity plastic surgery but we’re very careful, I hope, not to be insensitive and not to be face or body shamers and to do it properly.” That, of course, will be determined in the episodes to come.

The most this show will do is appeal to people’s natural curiosity and, probably, kill some of the secrecy of plastic surgery, especially if more candid quasi-famous guests come on and admit to their nip-tucks. In the clip above, Beverly Hills non-housewife Brandi Glanville talks about her cosmetic work, including vaginal rejuvenation—”The inside, not the outside,” she says—and then plays a game of Tap It or Tweak It (yeah, what?).

The one wild card might be co-host Sandra Vergara, who’s a little more frivolous with her judgment. While the hosts appraised photos of celebs like Renee Zellweger and Shania Twain, Vergara pointed out that Donatella Versace “used to be so beautiful.” So… yeah.

There was also an engrossing segment where Dr. Dubrow and his wife Heather, from Real Housewives of Orange County, got a blood facial that involved using leeches to suck blood from your stomach for a rejuvenating treatment.

Heather says she and Terry had to stick sanitary pads to their stomachs to catch the blood that was gushing out all day as a result of this. Yeah, seems worth it!

This is all bad and entertaining and only superficially enlightening, which basically means it’s good. Below, watch Tiffany “New York” Pollard, who appeared on last night’s Botched, talk about her boob and nose job and how she feels now.