Ronica Licciardello, the newly crowned Miss Philadelphia, says she favors a behind-the-scenes look at the Miss America pageant.
Posted on 04/09/2005 4:57:40 AM PDT by MississippiMasterpiece
ATLANTIC CITY - Miss America has lost her TV show, and now has to decide how much of her famous modesty she's willing to shed to get it back on the air.
Organizers of the pageant are considering a number of plans to resuscitate the 85-year-old contest and bring it back to television this September. The mildest plans include tweaking the broadcast program slightly by eliminating the talent portion, which the ABC network had complained about before dropping the show in the aftermath of last year's disappointing ratings.
A bolder plan is being shopped by national pageant officials among network executives: turning the event into a multinight elimination, complete with appeals for audience sympathy and votes, something like "American Idol" on Fox. It would include behind-the-scenes segments and, perhaps, some of the plotting that has made shows like "The Apprentice" on NBC so popular.
Even the pageant's executives say that Miss America has to face the realities of reality television, although state and local organizers say they would rather see their program stay off the air than have contestants get down in the mud and the bugs like the competitors on "Fear Factor."
"I'll tell you one thing, I am not going to have my contestants eating bugs," said Joe P. Sanders 3rd, president of the Miss South Carolina Organization. "That's just not something that's going to happen in this state."
Short of that, though, organizers say that something needs to change to catch up with an audience whose tastes have wandered far beyond the Miss America pageant's mild tone.
"The television audience today has a coliseum mentality, and they are not cheering for the gladiator, they're cheering for the lion," said Robert W. Arnhym, director of California Miss America, the group that runs the state-level pageant. "I'll tell you this: We're going to have to cross the line somewhere or we're not going to appeal to those folks."
Other state and national officials agree that the pageant has to do more to grab the public's attention.
"Television is a very competitive game, we all get that," said Kevin McAleese, executive director of the Miss Philadelphia Scholarship Pageant. "The question is, how do we adapt to that and bend the rules a little, but not give up all the values that we've stood for 85 years? We've got to be realistic, because we've got to be visible, and if you're not on television, you're not visible."
The Miss America pageant was born in 1921 as a stunt to keep summer visitors at the Jersey Shore after Labor Day, and it has felt the pressure to change before. After feminists protested on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City in 1968, pageant officials shifted the emphasis from beauty to scholarship, and stressed the talent portion of the contest over the famous runway parade in swimsuit and four-inch heels.
These days the challenge is not to move away from female exploitation, but to make it work for the pageant - without giving up too much of the core values of a show that did not even allow two-piece bathing suits until 1997.
The pressure is coming from a television industry that now embraces shows like Pamela Anderson's "Stacked." Despite polls showing that Americans deplore the values being beamed or cabled into their family rooms, the ratings say otherwise, and in its 50 years on the air, the pageant's audience has eroded.
Last year, when its audience fell to fewer than 10 million viewers, ABC decided to drop the pageant. At stake is the pageant's long-term viability: Miss America relies on the $3.2 million broadcast contract to help stay afloat as a national organization.
Broadcasters show data proving that the talent show and the interviews, the pageant's answers to feminist criticism, were the least popular portions of the pageant, while the swimsuit part still had the power to bring viewers back from the kitchen.
So pageant officials - who still require chaperones for contestants when they are in Atlantic City - are thinking about showing a little more.
"What we are proposing out in L.A. is that we open up the sacred doors of Miss America," said Art McMaster, executive director of the national organization, who said he was negotiating with several networks and producers to find a perch for the pageant on television.
He said the organization was proposing to "offer up to the networks the entire group of young individuals who have been out there competing, so they can see them backstage, rehearsing or getting ready - to see their strengths and their fears."
People close to the negotiations say Mr. McMaster is pitching a multinight competition that allows viewers to develop a connection with individual contestants, perhaps capped by a national phone or Internet vote for the winner.
"The only way Miss America is going to get a piece of the competitive craziness out there is for Miss America to be chosen by Americans themselves," said Mr. McAleese of the Philadelphia pageant.
Late last month, Broadcasting and Cable Magazine, a trade publication, reported that the pageant was close to reaching a deal, but the pageant refused to discuss the report.
"We are still in negotiations in Los Angeles, and there are still several people who are interested in this thing," Mr. McMaster said. "Where we end up is up to our board of directors, but we still believe strongly that we can be on live network television this fall."
Ronica Licciardello, who as the newly crowned Miss Philadelphia is in line for the state and then the national competition, said she liked the idea of giving viewers a look backstage. But she was sure that what the sacred curtain conceals is only more of what goes on in front of it: women who are positive, supportive and cheerful.
"Seeing the real side of these contestants could be a real experience for people," she said, "because I think they would go into this with the expectation of cattiness and meanness, and they don't realize the sense of camaraderie and the sense of support that we feel for each other."
But Jessica Eddins, 25, a former Miss South Carolina and now a graduate student in Southern California, insisted that Miss America's values were more durable than the cheap thrills of reality television.
"Everybody has expressed to me the moral value of retaining this positive tradition, one that shows traditional values and personal achievement," she said.
The organization's chief rival, Miss USA and its subsidiary, Miss Universe, are beyond these concerns. Both show more skin than Miss America shows, and both are annual broadcasting successes.
While Miss America is a nonprofit, volunteer-run organization whose pageant is the culmination of a network of separate local contests, Miss USA is a show business venture - with no local competitions - owned by Donald Trump and NBC. And where Miss America insists that it is all about the millions in scholarships its contestants win each year, Miss USA, as its Web site points out, is simply "the search for the most beautiful girl in the U.S."
NBC has even combined Miss USA with "Fear Factor." It is staging "Miss USA Fear Factor" as the lead-in for the national telecast of the beauty pageant on Monday. With the broadcast possibilities limited for Miss America, though, organizers say a potential reality television savior has come knocking: Mr. Trump.
"He has reached out to us, no question about it," Mr. McMaster said. "He has made no proposal to us, and we're not sure where this thing is going to wind up, and as we continue down the road with the networks, we are going to be interested in seeing what kind of proposals Donald is willing to bring to the Miss America Organization."
Ronica Licciardello, the newly crowned Miss Philadelphia, says she favors a behind-the-scenes look at the Miss America pageant.
"I'm surfing porn sites!"
"Well get your butt out here ... it's time for the swimsuit competition!"
I think one reason no one cares about Miss America is that no one ever sees one. Miss America should be making visits to the heartland And then it has gotten so politically correct. Frankly, who cares any more. The last one that was any good was the one that has Veterans as her "cause" after that it went down hill, diversity, give me a break. I hear enough of that plenty of other places. But she won.
I vote for topless mud-wrestling. Put it on HBO.
Put 50 people up in front of the world, selected for their looks and singing/dancing talent alone, and then put them on the spot on live TV and try to get them to sound intelligent. The only possible result is that they will tell the interviewer what s/he wants to hear.And that is just as true of the interviewer himself as it is of the girls he's interviewing; he is a mere celebrity who, without any real intellectual credentials, is just trying to sound intelligent. So he is just faking it, too.
That process goes right up to the journalists - who are in general very little different than the intellectually compeletely uncredentialed showgirls themselves. But he can go along with the herd of other journalists similarly situated. As long as he stays with the herd, he knows he's safe. Safe from his worst fear, which is getting bad PR.
And where does the herd go? The herd is superficial because of short deadlines, just like the showgirl is on the spot with the TV camera pointed at her and the microphone in front of her mouth. And the herd is critical of those who actually have to make decisions and get things done - because "any fool can criticize, and most fools do." Any silly criticism or second-guess will do to inflate the ego of the shallow writer and the equally shallow reader/hearer of the criticism.
Eventually the facts will catch up with any particular shallow criticism - but of course, when that happens that only signifies that it is time for the journalists to change the subject. Ronald Reagan was mercilessly criticized as a "Right Wing Cold Warrior" and a reckless cowboy who would cause WW III - until suddenly "the Cold War is over." No discussion of who won and who lost until Reagan's funeral 15 years later - and then absolutely NO discussion of the fact that journalism and journalism's acolytes known as liberals were the vehement opponents of the man who actually did the right thing.
All that to say that the interview portion of the Miss America Pageant is just as unedifying as the swimsuit competition.
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate
New competitions on the show...
Victorias Secret competition
Chocolate Pudding Wrestling
Cooking (sort of like Iron Chef, but stuff we'd like to eat)
Mark
Media bias bump.
I think you've saved the pageant!
"I'm surfing porn sites!"
"Well get your butt out here ... it's time for the swimsuit competition!"
Exactly.
I think it's time for Miss America to hang it up. It just can't compete with what else is out there.
I felt the same way about the Barnum and Bailey Circus when I saw it last year.
When it is so obvious that "diversity" plays a part in choosing, people lose interest.
These ladies have served food for fund raisers for a local soup kitchen, another for a literacy drive and more.
They are there, but you have to know where to look
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