Parenting & Family Quote by Debra Messing

There is a whole cultural autobiography packed into the phrase "guilty pleasure": a tiny confession that preemptively disarms judgment. Debra Messing isn’t just admitting she watched Project Runway; she’s acknowledging the social script that tells women, especially mothers, to account for every minute. The "guilt" isn’t about the show being trashy so much as the time being unproductive, the attention being hers.

The timing is the point. "While my son was napping or nursing" frames watching TV as something smuggled into the margins of caregiving, a reward tucked between demands. It’s a portrait of early motherhood where leisure doesn’t arrive as a right, but as an opportunistic steal. Messing’s specificity makes it legible to anyone who’s lived on borrowed hours: you don’t schedule pleasure, you catch it.

Project Runway is also a savvy choice of comfort viewing. It’s aspirational and disposable at once: creativity, makeovers, clear winners and losers, a satisfying arc that resolves inside an hour. That structure is soothing when your own day is amorphous and dictated by someone else’s needs. The show’s world of adults making things, getting critiqued, being seen, quietly mirrors what new parenthood can erase: the feeling of having a self with tastes and stakes.

Messing’s intent reads less like celebrity relatability and more like a quick, wry claim: yes, I was nurturing someone else, and I still needed a small corner of glittering, low-stakes autonomy.