Boo to all the haters

Tonight as always, Hilary and I enjoyed our much-treasured mass-culture phenomenon: America's Next Top Model. The show is so brilliant for so many reasons, that I cannot possibly do it justice in this fairly limited format. Simply, the show takes a pool of women (between the ages of 18 and 25 or so) and whittles them down until one remains, to be crowned America's Next Top Model, with a modeling contract and the media exposure that provides. As the weeks pass (I believe there are a total of 12), the women learn the do's and don'ts of being a model, including walking runway in high-heels, vaseline on the gums for a frictionless smile, and the mysterious secrets of padding. The show has a very ethnically-diverse group of contestants, which is certainly refreshing in the usually lily-white world of prime time tv; they are also all quite thin (with the exception of one seemingly token plus size model) and tend to not be "conventionally beautiful." The second episode of each season is always amoung our favorites, as the women all undergo dramatic makeovers. So you get the whole ghastly brilliance of experts recutting their appearence from whole cloth, that is, the whole appeal of those make-over shows. Then, because they all live together in a posh manhattan town hose (or LA loft this season), you get all the pointless inter-personal drama you can eat, a la the Real World. Finally, the contestants are all rather cruelly judged by a panel of experts at the end of each episode, which is certainly thie highlight of each episode. One of the panelists is Janice Dickinson, and I would be willing to watch the show just to catch a glimpse of her. She is billed as "The World's First Supermodel", although one gets the impression that she can remember very little of the heady world of her Studio 54-supermodel life; certain indications include her much proffered charm bracelet from the last days of disco, made entirely of coke spoons. She is so caustic, and so clearly resentful of the young women and their youthful beautfy, that is makes for staggeringly good tv.