Pageant Place

Several weeks ago I confessed that I viewed, with inappropriate interest, the Miss Teen USA pageant. Now my insanity has taken an extra step as I tuned in to Pageant Place, a reality show on MTV. This show gives the viewer a behind the scenes glimpse at the winners of the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants (all owned by Donald Trump) as they share a New York apartment. Like Athena being born from the forehead of Zeus, this show would appear to have been created straight from my fevered fantasies.

I thought the show might be a more chaste version of The Girls Next Door, which chronicle the three bimbos that call themselves the girlfriends of Hugh Hefner, sybarite and Playboy magazine honcho. Mercifully, though, Trump is not banging (or even pretending to bang) these girls, he was a minor presence on the first show. Instead this is more like a Real World with beauty queens. In the first show, Miss Universe, Riyo Mori of Japan, has just won her crown. She moves in (and gets the biggest bedroom because she has the most prestigious title). Miss USA, Rachel Smith, is constantly reminded that she lost to Mori (as well as falling on her ass during the evening-gown competition).

Miss Teen USA is Katie Blair, who got involved in the scandal that almost cost the previous Miss USA, Tara Conner, her title. Turns out that Blair thought Conner was hitting on her boyfriend, so she turned her in for doing coke. This all happens in the first five minutes, and I was surprised that Trump has chosen to exploit every canker in this set-up, instead of promoting it as all sunshine and rainbows. Of course, a show about girls getting along famously wouldn't make very good television, even if they are skimpily attired.

To make the show even more juicy, Trump has decided to keep Conner in the fold and use her for public appearances, which puts Smith and Blair both on edge, as Smith feels her year is being infringed on, while Blair thought she was done with Conner for good. Conner, now out of rehab, is ready to get back on the horse, and as the first show ends, she's knocking on the door of the apartment, while Smith huddles under a quilt, unable to rise to greet her.

While waiting for this show to come on, I watched the last few minutes of the Real World, the show that inspired all of these copycats. I've never been a fan, even if they do cast hot chicks. These shows (such as The Hills, which I've heard a lot about but never seen) seem to be predicated on the notion that whenever girls are put together in close quarters they will inevitably squabble over boys, and apparently this is interesting to people.

Of course, when you have a show where a camera is following someone around during what normally would be private moments you have to wonder about the verisimilitude. How many times do they need to restage moments? Are they coached to behave certain ways? Will there be any shots of them in bikinis? All important matters to consider.