Spotlighting the Creative Minds behind America’s Next Top Model
Spotlighting the Creative Minds behind America’s Next Top Model by Roxanne McDonald
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Their strike and certain criticism aside, the writers and their fantastic ideas for modeling challenges should be highlighted. |
It has been said that America’s Next Top Model ‘aint no Project Runway, but it isn’t trying to be. It has been sniffed that America’s Next Top Model is “trash”—when illustrious fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld implied it in his comment that “Trash that is funny for five minutes if you’re with other people. If you’re alone, it’s not funny.”
That America’s Next Top Model will never produce a Gemma Ward-caliber supermodel is the basis for criticism by Lagerfeld and others, including an Allure mag writer who bemoans how America’s Next Top Model “hasn’t exactly produced any supermodels.”
Well, the last we fans checked, we found the show is not purporting to be America’s Next Top Supermodel…and most of us don’t watch just for laughs. (We have Seinfeld and Boston Legal for that.)
At least, I know I watch for another reason—
the design of the competitions. So it’s time to highlight the creativity of the writers (nodding, of course, to those many make-up artists, wardrobe and prop peeps and others who execute the competitions in all their unique panache).
Consider the most recent (“The Girl Who Punk’d Ashton,” airing Wednesday, October 18th) challenge: the girls were each dressed and made up to look like a celebrity couple, each model first taking on the persona of one celeb, then the celeb’s mate. The best of each shot was then merged into one couple shot.
The challenge required acting while embodying the likes of Beyonce and JayZ (Eugena), JLo and Marc Anthony (AJ), Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston (Jaeda), Ellen Degeneres and Portia de Rossi (Michelle), Oprah and Stedman (Anchal), Angelina and Brad (Caridee), Demi and Ashton (Amanda), Britney and K-Fed (Brooke), and Melania and the Trump (Melrose). The outcome was striking (Caridee looked exactly like Angelina), fun (Amanda nailed the Ashton and Demi to the point where the judges found her double shot most convincing), and even, yes, Karl, funny (Ashal’s Stedman was bizarre what with the oversized old man wig, etc.).
The writers have done the doubling thing in other episodes as well, creating beautiful dualities, or even empowering the modeling contestants to be less introverted, have more confidence, or trump up their game-play with some new facial expressions. There was the hot car and hot versus a more puritanical (? well, more demure?) shoot where the girls were 1940’s pinups, for example, posing the models in two different outfits and attitudes and melding the photos as if the Janus (not Janice, ahem) entities were in communication.
Just as spectacular are the assignments that are made to include each of all the girls to adopt a themed persona: in one episode, for instance, each of the contestants is a medical or psychological representation of plastic surgery, anorexia, obsession with perfection, etc.. In another, each girl is one of the seven deadly sins. And in yet another,
each model wannabe personifies one of the twelve signs of the zodiac.
In other words, the contestants wiping dirty underwear on the hated one’s bed or the contestant questioning her sexual orientation kissing the androgynous bi-sexual roommate are the stuff of that which cannot be scripted and therefore are indeed entertaining (and help to perpetuate the nature of such reality TV programs).
But at the center of the misbehaving and mockery is a team of creative, innovative, and watch-worthy writing of competitions and challenges that offer viewers some substance—that which rivals any other personality, artistic skill, career, or other competition.
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