Reviews

(Bravo, Thursday, Aug. 21, 10 p.m.)

(Bravo, Tuesday, Sept. 9, 11 p.m.)

Bravo continues to count on audiences to “watch what happens” with new and returning reality shows focused largely on looking good and living well. The network has clearly hit on a formula for success — presumably striking a chord with more affluent women and gay men for whom even real estate can be sexy if the price is high enough.

Following in the grand tradition of haute couture (Project Runway) and coiffeurs (Shear Genius), Bravo this week takes another spin in the salon chair with Tabatha’s Salon Takeover, and the network adds yet another title to its style file early next month with The Rachel Zoe Project.

In Tabatha’s Salon Takeover, Aussie hairstylist Tabatha Coffey proves that you don’t have to win on a Bravo show to host one. A Shear Genius also-ran, Coffey now gets to play shear genius with no competition — drawing on her years of hair-business experience, she tries to help troubled salon keepers. First up: the not-so-perfect Ten Salon in Long Beach, Calif., where everything from staff morale to interior design conspire to sink a business that its married owners have put it all on the line for.

Think Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares transplanted to the salon, with Coffey standing in for know-it-all chef Gordon Ramsay (though Coffey’s disapproving looks and putdowns also conjure up Anne Robinson, host of the U.K./NBC quiz show The Weakest Link). Viewers who made Coffey a fan favorite on Shear Genius will probably tune in, but watching misguided entrepreneurs get a critical comb-over isn’t likely to convert viewers for whom Coffey just isn’t their cup of tea.

The Rachel Zoe Project also dispenses with the competition angle of a Shear Genius or Top Design (which kicks off its second season on Sept. 3) — unless you count celebrity stylist Zoe’s personal challenge to take her business and herself to the next level. The “project” here isn’t the runway but Zoe herself.

Zoe’s passion for her work can be infectious but it certainly helps understand what all the fuss is about if you’re already a friend of fashion. For comic relief, there’s Zoe’s team — tough talking Taylor and newbie Brad — whose bickering sometimes upstages their boss and hubby Rodger.

How Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and The Rachel Zoe Project fare will depend on what viewers think of do-or-dye Coffey and fashion-weak Zoe themselves. But as long as the formula works, Bravo is unlikely to revamp its “hair today, fashion tomorrow” programming slate anytime soon. —George Vernadakis

(Discovery, Monday, Aug. 18, 10 p.m.)

Discovery has set explorer Josh Bernstein — recruited away from History, where he hosted three high-rated seasons of Digging for the Truth — to work examining myths and legends, they include the flood of Genesis, whether Timbuktu was a city of gold and, in the first episode, whether the movies accurately depicted Roman gladiators.

Bernstein participates in a gladiator school in Rome, examines graffiti in Pompeii and tours arenas in Turkey and Tunisia. Bonus content in the review disk shows him flying over Ephesus in a motorized hang glider, braving a 22-knot crosswind on landing. He overworks the Hollywood myths angle — it’s not really that shocking some men volunteered to be gladiators, or that many times both fighters survived — and the B-movie supporting clips are cheesy. But the locales are colorful, some of the evidence is new and interesting — gladiators ate vegetarian diets, for example — and Bernstein has an appealing way of putting into other words what his expert witnesses have just explained. —Kent Gibbons