If you thought the Miss America pagent had died when ABC dropped it, think again.
The pagent may have died as a high-interest televised event. But now its organizers have a new idea fit for the 21st Century: why not turn it into a reality show?
The pageant, dropped by ABC (search) last year after historically low ratings, has inked a deal with William Morris and hopes to reinvent itself as a multi-episode reality show tracking contestants in regional competitions up to the live finale, according to Television Week.
This new version of the pageant would feature reality staples such as backstabbing and contestant eliminations.
“It really hit home this past year that viewers in America are changing quite a bit — what they want to see is different, and that’s been a problem with our show,” pageant president/CEO Art McMaster told The Post Monday.
“We were live on a Saturday night, and in the first 15 minutes, 42 of the contestants exited stage left,” McMaster said. “That doesn’t really help us when America wants to get to know everyone.
“That’s what it’s really all about — getting to know the ladies more than just the 10 final contestants,” he said. “We have to show their backgrounds, their strengths, their fears and ambitions, so there’s a connection between the TV set and America.
“We want to move into the reality world and have four to six lead-in shows to get to know the contestants. But that’s definitely up to the networks. We’ve thrown it out to them that we’re interested.”
Once one of TV’s top-rated shows, the Miss America Pageant has fallen on hard times in recent years, drawing only 9.8 million viewers last year — an all-time-low — and only 10.3 million viewers in 2003.
“We felt that [last year] was a combination of two things: We were stuck on a Saturday night, and our network partner [ABC] didn’t promote it,” McMaster said.
He leaves out a couple of things: a)it was a tired show, b)it was a tired concept, c)mass audiences don’t get as excited about beauty pagents as they once did.
Meanwhile, for the first time in 50 years the pageant doesn’t have a TV network. But McMaster (whose name sounds as if he is a slave driver at McDonald’s) indicates some cable outlets are considering it.
“I feel confident we’ll be on the network again, but we won’t know anything for another couple of weeks.”
Meanwhile, the audience non-clamor for Miss America goes on…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.