The model is leaving Bravo when the show decamps to Lifetime at the end of this season, but Niki Taylor and Elizabeth Berkley, who started this year as the hosts of Supermodel and Dance respectively, are keeping the channel’s 1990’s glam quotient high.
Least important as a qualification is the host’s tangential relationship with the show’s subject matter.

"I love food and I am naturally very obsessive about it," says Padma Lakshmi, the Indian actress, model, and cookbook author who hosts Top Chef.  "I can talk about it for hours and hours on end."

But it’s Bravo that’s getting the real blessing from this bonanza of competition shows, even if the channel, formerly fine-arts focused, is now consumed with considerably lesser “arts” such as hair styling or modeling.

Bravo’s other category of original programming, the “docudramas,” include gossipy shows like The Real Housewives (of, variously, the O.C., New York City, New Jersey, and most recently, Atlanta).

But it’s the creative competitions that have done the channel proudest, with successive seasons of Runway and Chef garnering bigger and bigger audiences.

Runway’s 2004 premiere garnered just over a million pairs of eyeballs. The most recent season, the fourth, had 3.9 million. And Chef has rocketed from 1.2 million to almost 3.2 million in four seasons, according to numbers provided by the network.

The shows also do particularly well with adults in the 18-49 age group, which advertisers prize; Bravo currently ranks a respectable 18th among ad-supported cable networks in that demographic.

But with so many creative competitions (although Runway is leaving and Supermodel and Dance don’t have confirmed second seasons, Top Design is coming back and the second season of Shear Genius just began), we wondered what’s next. Paris Hilton hosting a dog grooming show, Top Chihuahua?

Lakshmi says sports are the “next wave—the ultimate reality show, inherently.”

Problem is, asking a Bravo contestant to do sports is a lot like asking A-Rod to design jodhpurs. Unless…Is Venus Williams free?