Model Television

TYRA BANKS HAS COOKED UP A REALITY-TV HIT

Supermodel Tyra Banks should be a superheroine to the suits at UPN—she's given the straggling network a bouncing baby hit. As creator, executive producer, and presenter of America's Next Top Model, where 10 contestants try to out-sashay each other for an agency contract, she's a proud lioness presiding over boot camp. Her catwalk is no place for slackers! A stern but fair taskmistress, Miss Tyra also had the cunning inspiration to invite bad-girl ex-model Janice Dickinson to serve as a juror. The show's first season offered so many cherishable moments: the group bikini wax, the air torn with the yipes and yowls; the rooftop swimsuit shoot in the biting cold; the snippy showdown in Paris, billed as the "Pagans versus the Christians," between the party girls and the Bible-toting prudes; the spectacle of the eventual winner, Adrianne Curry, suffering from severe dehydration, dragging herself from a hospital bed rather than risk being voted out (trembling, pale-moist, she swayed on her feet before the judges like a prisoner standing at woozy attention in The Bridge on the River Kwai). Now making the modeling gosees in Manhattan, Adrianne, who normally has the deadpan lockjaw delivery of a born comedienne, gives serious thanks to the show. "I have the opportunity of a lifetime and I'm not going to blow it." What's brewing for season two, which begins this winter? Banks says she's taking the show up "a couple of notches," making it "edgier," more "high-fashion." And what Miss Tyra says, goes.

JAMES WOLCOTT

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