Has Lifetime built a better makeover show?

Taking a break from its steady routine of made-for-TV women-in-peril movies, the Lifetime channel recently premiered How To Look Good Naked, a new series that joins makeover mainstays like TLC's What Not To Wear and Style’s How Do I Look? with a similar mix of fashion policing and talk therapy.

Annoying title aside, the show's premise is intriguing — over the course of a week, give a woman a makeover while encouraging her to feel better about her body and herself, without tearing her down in the process. The host in this effort is Carson Kressley, late of Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and figuring'here as a somewhat unlikely fairy godmother. But though Kressley normally seems far quicker with a snappy pop-culture reference than a soothing affirmation, he worked wonders with the show's first subject, Layla, a 32-year old who admitted to being on diets since the age of 12.

When Kresley has Layla stand in her skivvies in front of several full-length mirrors and tell him what she doesn't like about her body, he turns the tables and tells her that these are precisely the things that are loveliest about her. The show's similar esteem-building moves include projecting a full-body photo of Layla on the side of a building and having Kressley quiz passers-by on what they find beautiful about the woman in the photo. And it all leads up to the big finish — after the requisite shopping and spa treatments, Layla poses nude (artfully, natch) in a professional studio.

How to Look Good Naked is clearly designed to get its participants — and its viewers — in triumphing-over-body-image tears. But I have to give it props, because unlike its fellow makeover shows, it's ultimately not about how unstylish/cheap/otherwise-unacceptable-to-the-hosts your current clothes are and how you should throw them all out and dress only in kitten heels and fitted blazers (hello, Stacy London and Tim Gunn). It's about beginning to repair the years of poor body image that's never specific to individual woman, but that’s rather an epidemic affecting all of them.