When you're a TV critic, you're inspired to write about a show for a variety of different reasons. Sometimes it's just your job to write about a show, or you weigh in because you either love or hate the program for some specific reason that you feel the overwhelming need to share with your readers.

For me, I'm sometimes just inspired by my annoyance with another think piece that I find to be especially off-base or too cute for its own good. I let that annoyance stew around in my head for awhile and then it spews out here for the world to see. My apologies in advance to all of you.

I haven't really written about this season's run of "Project Runway" since the premiere. Partly because while I watch the show regularly, I don't have the obsessive interest in it that some critics do. And since I already write enough in the course of a week, it's easy for me to just step back from a show I don't have strong opinions about one way or the other.

"Five Gays On Project Runway's Demise" is written by Choire Sicha, and it's well-written and a cute idea. I mean, you can almost imagine the emails going back-and-forth between writer and editor on this. "It's Project Runway...it's gay guys.....it's the Perfect Storm of snark."

What annoyed me about the finished product was that the gimmick of the piece got in the way of the real meat of the argument. Yeah, talking to gay guys about "Project Runway" might make some sense on a satirical level. But honestly, it ended up being not that helpful. It wasn't funny enough to stand alone as a goof, and all the insightful stuff was buried deep in the story.

The two most glaring—and, really, potentially awesome!—changes to Project Runway were, unfortunately, what people said they never got over: a change of networks and a change of coasts.

"3 words... Los Angeles Lifetime," suggested Tim Smith, a New York artists' studio manager, in a summation of the season. "Sucked sucked sucked."

"L.A. L.A. is what went wrong. Sun-addled brains made for irrelevant hack design," suggested Shane Hoffman, an acupuncture practitioner in New York.

Sigh. Granted, people tend to have short attention spans, but it's not as if Bravo was stop number one for the cool TV viewer when "Project Runway" premiered. In fact, other  than "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy," Bravo was a wasteland of old movies and odd reality shows seemed to be rejects from other networks. Perhaps the gay audience in New York is troubled by the network move, but the fact that the show premiered to such high numbers on Lifetime suggests that the show would do well no matter where it aired. Assuming, of course, that the show deserved the attention.

In fact, the move to Lifetime brought the half-hour companion show "Models Of The Runway," which I've found to be pretty entertaining. In previous seasons, the models have tended to be nothing more than living mannequins, and watching them wrangle back-and-forth for designers has been surprisingly fun.

The move to L.A. has also been overblown. Some of the best designers from previous seasons have come from Los Angeles and other places even farther away from the soft bosom of New York City. I think the only viewers who gave a damn about the move were those in New York who find it troubling anytime a significant pop culture event takes place somewhere not within a subway ride's distance from Times Square.

So why has "Project Runway" struggled this season? One good answer is buried at the top of page two of the Daily Beast piece and amusingly enough, it comes from the article's one "straight" guy:

Well, to address the issue of Irina, we must call in our token straight man, Tom Scocca, a married father in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.: "This past episode, as she was squinting over a pile of fake pelts while once again making three pieces while everyone else made one, I realized that what she is not a New York princess but a crazy indomitable immigrant. Suddenly I could see her in a babushka. She's mean for two reasons. One is that she has immigrant snobbishness—she has no use for anything that doesn't look luxe, because you don't want to ever be mistaken for poor. So she has a so-classy-it's-trashy thing. But the other reason she's mean is that she looks at these soft little Americans fluttering around the workroom and playing grabass and having dithering fits about their clothes, and she's like, why are you so weak and incapable of hard work? And she makes the fuck out of some clothes, whether you like how they look or not."

And that, my friends, is the best explanation I've heard about Irina's sometimes frantic snarkiness this season.

Then we have some comments like this one:

Bruce, Tim Smith's partner in life and in business at Artists Resource Management, was not pleased: "I am all for diversity and playing to your audience’s demographic, but please. And not to sound completely misogynistic, but three women as finalists? No fags? Really? These women were probably the most talented, but obviously when you tell the Bunim/Murray casting juggernaut, 'This is Lifetime: Television for Women, not talented gay male fashion designers,' you get what you get!"

REALLY? Ummm....I don't know where to start with that one. A move to Lifetime motivated producers to ignore talented gay male designers in favor of admittedly talented women. Trust me, that's a real misunderstanding of the dynamic on "Project Runway" and it implies that having too many gay male designers would somehow scare the female viewers. Which is nuts, considering the fact that the show's ability to attract women is the entire reason Lifetime fought so hard to get the show. And yes, you do sound completely misogynistic.

Finally, the article gets to the probable reason "Project Runway" has struggled this season. But even then, it opts for the snark ahead of facts.

You would have thought we'd appreciate some relief from the annoying omnipresence of longtime judges Michael Kors and Nina Garcia, who apparently don't like to go to L.A. either. Nearly every episode, we got a guest judge in one or both of their places. Incorrect! In the end, we missed them.

No, the reason they weren't on the show was that this season was filmed at a different time of the year. And the timing coincided with Fashion Week in Paris and some other big industry events. Neither judge has a problem with L.A., and they'll be back for the entire season next time.

But the frequent changes in judges did have a big impact and in recent interviews, Garcia has said that she and Kors would have made some other decisions about the eliminations if they had been around full-time.

It's tempting to read a lot of extraneous crap into the problems at "Project Runway." But in the end, the changes in judging and the natural ratings slump you find in any reality show after a number of seasons are probably the main cause of the ratings decline.

I'm all in favor of snark, and I've certainly written my share of pieces that wasted the reader's time. On a day when I wasn't so stressed and grumpy, I might have let my annoyance with the Daily Beast piece pass. But sometimes if I don’t let my annoyance out for the world to see, I just can’t relax.

While my readers might not feel better at this point, I'm relaxed and ready for a nap.