“There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” said PT Barnum, the mega-successful 19^th century American showman and circus owner.

One has to wonder if that proverb weighed on the minds of Kiss of Death (KOD), the six-member women’s billiards team, who opted to star in Kiss of Death in 2010. The eponymous web series followed the women in the 12 weeks leading up to the May 2010 BCA Pool League National 8-Ball Championship, where they would compete in the Women’s Masters Team Division for the first time.

Presented by NYCgrind.com, a now defunct New York​-based online pool and billiards magazine, Kiss of Death was a series of weekly five-minute webisodes featuring members of the KOD team:  Alison Fischer (the editor of NYCgrind), “Queen B” Borana Andoni, Olga Gashcova, Michelle Li, Emily “The Billiard Bombshell” Duddy, and team captain Gail “g2” Glazebrook. Having won the Women’s Open Championship in 2009, KOD hoped not only history would repeat, but also that the lead-up to the tournament would make for engaging viewing.

Let’s start with the obvious: this web series was terrible.

I made it through the first four webisodes before I nodded off due to complete boredom. Judging from the number of views on YouTube, I’m probably not alone. (Episode 2 had 8,690 views. Episode 5 had just 1,737 views.) You can watch the first episode here.

Kiss of Death suffered from a fatal mix of lack of script and plot; an over-reliance on a single song for each episode; the in-your-face promotion of Poison Billiards; ridiculous montages of the women being cute for the camera; and an insufficient amount of enjoyable billiards. By episode 4, when half the time is spent watching the women watch themselves on episode 3 (oooh…how meta), I knew I would not make it through the remaining two thirds.

Apparently, the KOD women did not fare much better. The first place Women’s Masters Team prize of $3500 was won by Magoo’s Masters from Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Team Tick Tick Boom from Chicago took second, followed by team Logistically Challenge.

But, PT Barnum was onto something. While the web series was a bust, it most certainly sowed the seeds for a future wave of media and self-promotion, primarily focused on some of these same New York based female billiards players.

About 18 months after Kiss of Death, Gail Glazebrook teamed up with Jennifer “9mm” Barretta to launch Rack Starz. In partnership with Amsterdam Billiards, local home court to many of these women, Rack Starz featured a dozen “sexy intelligent women from all over the world brought together to take the game of pool out of the smoke-filled back room and into the mainstream limelight. The Rack Starz are not only athletes, but they are also moms, models, actresses, nutritionists, CEOs, and marketing analysts, with many holding advanced degrees.”^[1]

The 12 members of Rack Starz featured the original six KOD members, plus Neslihan Gurel, Supadra Geronimo, Caroline Pao, Jennifer Barretta, Yomalin Feliz, and Liz Ford.

While RackStarz would fizzle out years later, the women successfully leveraged the early excitement and media attention to star in another web series, Sharks, in 2012.  This equally ill-fated series featured a number of the same women (i.e., Jennifer Barretta, Borana Andoni, Caroline Pao) portraying fictional ladies who hang out around Amsterdam Billiards.  Unfortunately, some enjoyable billiards scenes could not compensate for the series’ cheap production value, hackneyed soap opera dialogue, and paper-thin characters.

Maybe it didn’t matter.

Three years later, two of the NYC women – Jennifer Barretta and Emily Duddy — skyrocketed past their niche web audience to that of mainstream television by starring in TruTV’s new pseudo-reality show The Hustlers about a group of pool players vying for the top spot on Steinway Billiards’ “The List.” Unfortunately, the show elicited strong reactions, many of them negative, from viewers, who found the premise and the characters preposterous.

TruTV opted not to renew The Hustlers. For a while, that decision appeared to mark the end of the NYC billiards women’s media run.

And yet, it did not.

In 2019, Emily Duddy was back, this time in the new Bravo series In a Man’s World, executive produced by Oscar winner Viola Davis.  Far more serious than any of the previous billiards incarnations, the “Emily” episode focused on exposing the sexism women experience every day through temporary gender transformation and hidden cameras. Ms. Duddy, in makeup and prosthetics, became Alex, a male pool player.  Jennifer Barretta came back on camera as friend and confidante. And the cartoonish Finnegan, most recently seen on The Hustlers, but even popping up way back when on Kiss of Death, was the uber-chauvinist who learns a thing or two about disparaging women.

I guess Kiss of Death wasn’t such a kiss of death after all.

[1]      https://www.newswire.com/news/rack-starz-launch-new-website-93762