America's Next Top Model

I think I've been Tyra'd. Every few cycles of America's Next Top Model, there's one modelette who is too something. Too sexy, too high-spirited, too jittery (like this cycle's Marjorie). Week after week she gets the same comments from the judges to be a little less whatever. She eventually comes to judging devoid of personality, at which point she is sent home for getting too bland.

With the crowning of McKey as this cycle's America's Next Top Model, I realize that Tyra Banks has worn me down in a similar way.

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On last night's episode, after McKey won, she let loose with a little monologue about how she had grown up a tomboy, started modeling at fifteen, couldn't quite make it happen, and tried out for America's Next Top Model for one final shot at modeling success. With this happy rush of words, the show finally gave me what had been lacking for me all along with McKey: some charm.

That's not to say in real life she never had it before, but in the edited version we saw, what we mainly got from McKey on the show was an absence. She didn't really do anything offensive or outlandish, nor did any insecurities or struggles that she may have had seem to garner a lot of screen time.

Instead, she showed up, she took good pictures, she put forth her best effort at the challenges, she sometimes didn't do so great and so she seemed to try to learn from it in order to improve the next time.

So…so what? Isn't that exactly what a young woman trying to become a successful model should do? And if so, why had I been resistant to McKey all season long?

And that's when I realized I'd been Tyra'd.

My natural inclination with America's Next Top Model has generally been ruthlessly shallow. I didn't care how likable a girl was, I cared how great her photos looked.

But after many seasons of seeing the most high-fashion looking girls sent home for some perceived deficiency with their personality, I clearly had started thinking much the same way.

I still do wish that McKey could have broken through with more connection with the camera in many of her otherwise solid shots. Nigel Barker noted in his evaluation last night that he too had wondered if McKey truly had star presence. But he noted that she seemed to be able to bring out a confidence and charisma in her runway walk that bodes well for where she could go.   And the fact that she was able to go from a pretty disastrous commercial to a fairly adequate one means she might be able to do more than just look great.

Additionally, McKey is probably one of the few winners of recent America's Next Top Model cycles who actually has both the look and the height of a high fashion model, something that hasn't seemed to come in one package lately on this show.

We'll have to see if McKey can take this launching pad and turn it into an actual real fashion world top model career, but at the least, in the end she won over one skeptical viewer.



- Leslie Seaton, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
(Image courtesy of CW)