It is something of a wonder that age, a kiss of death in the fashion industry, has yet to founder “America’s Next Top Model,” the twenty-fourth season of which strutted its way onto VH1 last week. (The second episode airs on Tuesday.) As ratings have steadily declined in the past decade, the show has entertained endless renovations to its format, switching networks, discharging beloved judges, allowing male models to compete in several seasons, and even, in a temporary and largely unpopular change inspired by the likes of “American Idol,” including viewer input in its weekly evaluations. It pressed on, too, after its inimitable matriarch, the supermodel turned mogul Tyra Banks, who launched the series in 2003, stepped away from her host position last season and was replaced by the singer and actress Rita Ora. But, for the show’s most loyal nostalgists, who have absorbed entire marathons of the series and learned every word in Banks’s outlandish lexicon—what it means to “smize” and “tooch” and “booch”—a “Top Model” without Tyra was no “Top Model” at all. Fans clamored for their original leader; Banks relented with a carefully worded volte-face. The recent première—titled “The Boss Is Back”—is devoted in large measure to reëstablishing her place at the helm of her hard-earned empire.
The miracle of Banks’s decade-and-a-half-long tenure as the host of “America’s Next Top Model” is that she has managed, season after season, to extract some semblance of wisdom from entertainment that might otherwise appear (especially in light of recent allegations of abuse in the fashion industry) merely exploitative. “Top Model” is a show about work—work that is physically demanding, sometimes demeaning, and often overtly hostile to women. Over the years, aspiring models have competed in nine-inch stilettos and on treadmill runways and between raging pillars of flame; wearing meat bikinis and garbage bags and garments made of human hair; dressed as homicide victims and cancer patients and half-nude croutons sprawled on gargantuan Greek salads; with crocodiles and cockroaches and one very difficult, very dashing tarantula. (The sheer strain of brainstorming new concepts for the competition tempted producers to snuff “Top Model” more than a decade ago.) This season, in a pledge to inclusivity, Banks has decided to lift the age limit that, since the show’s inception, had prevented aspirants older than twenty-seven from trying their chances. The new season features, in addition to a Ukrainian activist and a celibate Muslim and a Trump supporter named Liberty, a forty-two-year-old grandmother of three. “I’m about to beat the competition because I have years of experience,” she says, bent on impressing her pristine, industrious mentor.
In past seasons, Banks has presided over the proceedings with a stern, sometimes brutal maternity. When a Somali model (and victim of genital mutilation) failed to shave her armpits for a shoot, Banks admonished, “A razor’s a dollar. Retouching an armpit is like a thousand.” When a contestant criticized for her Southern accent emerged as the victor one season, Banks told her, “We’re gonna get you some voice lessons, girl!” The judges once nearly eliminated a deaf contestant who flubbed a nocturnal photo shoot in which the other contenders relied on spoken direction to pose. A biracial competitor was sent home after delivering an unpersuasively romantic commercial with a male model who had told her, before filming began, that he did not like black girls. If a model refused to photograph nude, she was ridiculed. If she had Asperger’s syndrome, she was called awkward. If she got word that a childhood friend had suddenly perished, she was still dropped into a grave, eight feet deep, to portray one of the seven deadly sins. And, if she suffered hypothermia while posing for a beauty shot in an icy pool, she was somehow chided both for failing to articulate her physical limits and for being fragile. Through it all, Banks exhorted her girls, with a signature verbal panache, to “be all you can be, not bitch all you can bitch.”
The most notorious “Top Model” moment—immortalized, with so many others, in an array of multi-purpose memes—took place in an episode aptly titled “The Girl Who Pushes Tyra Over the Edge.” Banks’s patience was tested by a contestant who seemed insufficiently devastated by the fact that she’d been eliminated. When Banks heard her laughing off the loss, she unleashed a jaw-dropping torrent of disappointment on the twenty-two-year-old woman for failing to avail herself of the opportunity of a lifetime. The host has since renounced her outburst, joining outsiders in its parody, but the incident lingers as a perfect demonstration of the show’s conflicting desires. On one hand, by eliminating models for even understandable faults, Banks seeks to impart harsh lessons about an industry known for its superficial strictures. On the other hand, she expects to connect with contestants as a sort of rarefied fairy godmother, capable of inspiring rags-to-riches stories even as she dashes who knows how many dreams. (It should be said that the show’s most successful alumnae tend to be runners-up, while its most vocal detractors are often past winners disillusioned by what their victory has failed to deliver.) In preparing her underlings for an unfair business and her audience for the generalized lessons it yields, Banks has managed to fulfill a delicate role as protector and antagonist in one. To a thirty-four-year-old contestant who talked back to the judges on last week’s première, Banks said, “You know, the interesting thing is you’re probably older than people on this panel, but now you are a child, and I am talking to you almost like a parent, like tough love. So when you come in this room, in my house, you respect my judges. You got that?”
In Banks’s world, of course, defeat is more frequent than victory. In the new season, it is Erin Green, the grandmother, who has so far embodied the show’s favorite value: resilience. Viewers winced at her early enthusiasm, knowing that, for all this season’s emphasis on inclusivity, Green had not appeared on a list of fourteen finalists that was leaked, by VH1, a month before the season’s première. Sure enough, Green was eliminated, apparently for failing to impress during a lush shoot in a garden. But, as she tearfully tugged her luggage toward the model mansion’s door, Banks materialized behind her with words of unalloyed sympathy and encouragement. “I’m so, so sorry,” she said. “I know this meant a lot to you.” And then, in a final twist, she produced Green’s photograph with a soapy proclamation: “Beauty knows no age, no size, no color,” she said, “and you deserve to be here with every single one of these girls.” In a confessional, Green echoed the same sentiment. “I put my dreams on hold because I wanted to raise a family,” she wept. “But I never stopped dreaming.” Let the cynics scoff. It was a touching moment, however forced the pose.
