Gay icon Margaret Cho returns to television on VH1 in a show billed as a “reality sitcom.” The show offers a revealing look inside the life of the foul-mouthed comic.
The Cho Show, a new seven-episode, half-hour series is set to premiere on August 21 on music channel VH1. Cho returns to television after a thirteen year absence – she starred in a short-lived ABC situation comedy All-American Girl in 1995. Since then, she has attracted a new audience by turning four comic concerts – I'm The One That I Want, Notorious C.H.O, CHO Revolution and Assassin – into hit films.
“It's the closest I've been able to come on television to what I do as a comic,” Cho told the Advocate. “It's like a sitcom but with real people playing the parts.”
The show will include Cho surrounded by people in her everyday life as they tackle such issues as anal bleaching, plastic surgery with the queen herself Joan Rivers, making a sex tape, and Cho's haunted vagina.
The show has a sense of a reality show, but viewers will immediately recognize it has been scripted to heighten Cho's comedy. For example, several pivotal people in her life appear on the show – her parents and longtime friend Selena Luna as her assistant – but her husband, visual artist Al Ridenour, does not. And a trio of gay men – stylists John Stapleton, Charlie Altuna, and John Blaine – who make up her “Glam Squad” were scripted into the show.
Cho's gay appeal is due to her bisexual comic references: “Am I gay? Am I straight? I was just slutty!” She insists her comedy does reflect her real sexuality, “I've enjoyed a big, big variety of different kinds of sex. I was worried about that when I was younger, like, 'Why do I have to be so slutty?' And then I realized it's fun to be slutty.”
The Cho Show premieres August 21, on cable channel VH1