Can Miss America Survive? David Loftus

Once again, I must confess my relative cultural isolation (by choice). Never having been much of a television watcher, and being very selective about what I do watch, I’ve never seen a Miss America pageant … or no more than a few seconds when I might have happened to be “passing through.” I think the only time I ever channel surf is when I encounter a TV set in a hotel room, which occurs when my wife and I are on vacation, and that is rare enough. (The last time would have been London in September.) So I could hardly pose as an expert on the show’s strengths, weaknesses, or possible (past) appeal.

I have to suspect, however, that the Miss America pageant has become a victim of its own dignity, strange to say. Partly after having been indicted in the Sixties by the women’s movement for “objectifying women,” the pageant has probably taken extra care to be stately and respectable, which makes for “bad” TV: static, uneventful … in a word, boring. There’s no blood, no violence, no real (simulated) sex, you have to wait hours for a fairly brief screaming-with-joy-and-tears fit that you can get in less than a half hour on any game show, and -- most unfortunate for the pageant -- you can see more beautiful and alluring women regularly in advertisements. (Especially those intrusive Victoria’s Secret ads.)

The pageant began in 1921, and has been a television staple for 56 years. It moved to ABC from NBC in 1996, was picked up by the country-music channel CMT in 2006, and finally by TLC in 2008. Oddly enough, the 2010 competition in January was watched by 4.5 million, up from 3.5 million the previous year and the biggest audience it has had since moving to cable, but apparently that wasn’t good enough. I should have thought CMT viewers would have been the perfect audience for this show, so if it could not survive there, I think it’s time for it to say 89 years is great run, and it’s probably time to retire. The pageant’s values now cause it to miss America, and I doubt America will miss it.