When historians seek to learn about American society and pop culture at the start of the 21st century, they'd be wise to check out reality shows. The recently released first season of America's Next Top Model, for instance, functions not just as an unusually engaging reality show, but also as an invaluable sociological text. Its obsession with beauty standards makes explicit all the social conditioning that's normally implicit in everyday life.
In many ways, Model qualifies as a boilerplate reality show, complete with all the hoary tropes of the genre, from the opening nationwide search to the final showdown. As with most reality TV, the success of the show boils down mainly to casting, which is where it really excels. In both the judging and the modeling, the show revolves around a pair of strong opposite poles. On the judging side, Tyra Banks serves as good cop to early supermodel/ troglodyte Janice Dickinson, whose skin has been pulled so taut that she now both looks and behaves like the love child of Joan Crawford and Skeletor. In her defining moment on the show, Banks explodes and indignantly accuses Dickinson and her ilk of encouraging eating disorders with their draconian ideals of fitness. Her righteous anger feels cathartic and refreshing, but more than a little disingenuous, given the time Model spends on reinforcing those same notions.
On the contestant side, the show quickly focuses on the clashing mindsets of Christian Southern beauty queen Robin Manning and her arch-nemesis Elyse Sewell, a brainiac doe-eyed waif—and self-professed "militant atheist"—who does nothing to hide her seething contempt for Manning and the rest of the Bible brigade. As the show chugs along, the contestants replicate the country's cultural split, with Manning's sanctimonious Christians squaring off against Sewell's heathens. The insufferably self-righteous Manning doesn't seem to realize that even Banks wouldn't get far if she refused to wear anything more revealing than a petticoat, but her cultural antagonists can be grating in their own right. Still puffed up with the smug narcissism of youth, Sewell has an unbecoming way of trumpeting her intellectual superiority. But Sewell softens up as the show progresses, and she forms a warm, borderline-romantic bond with fellow contestant Adrianne Curry, a high-school dropout who manages to seem cool and fun even while looking and sounding like she stumbled out of a methadone clinic a few weeks prematurely. As the season heads into the home stretch, Sewell and Curry's flirtation continually threatens to turn the show into a romance, which is just one of the many unexpected reasons the show towers over its reality-TV peers.