Trivia NYC/DSO Media

I feel like taking on something crazy, because what the hell else do I have planned, and also, whatever keeps my mind off my lack of work.

This is the first of a series of recaps of the latest vh1 trainwreck of beefcake & cheesecake, America’s Most Smartest Model. It’s kind of long, so I’m tucking most of it behind the jump. Enjoy. You know you want to.

* * *

To start the opening montage of the show, host Ben Stein, in voice-over, drones about how they apparently put out a call for models who thought they were smart. Keep this in mind as you read this, and as you watch the show. These people were models who actually thought they were smart enough to succeed on this show. These are people who scoffed at Zoolander, even if they didn’t get the jokes. Just remember that.

“I’m Mary Alice Stephenson, and I’ve been in the fashion business for 17 years.” She seems tall and businesslike, cast for her posture and commanding voice as much as for the fact that she’s worked “…for magazines such as Vogue, Marie Claire, Allure…” which she tells us about as a cascade of magazine covers flashes across the screen, all of them various editions of Harper’s Bazaar, which is the only job she actually cops to having. (Note: magazines “such as” Vogue and Allure may include: Dog Fancy, Maximum Rock & Roll, or Better Henhouses & Kennels.) She also has a propensity to drop the corner of her head whenever she makes a pertinent point, in a way that indicates this is a woman who’s used to arguing while drunk. She’s good for pushing people around. I hope. This show will live and die by how mean it is.

“So we devised a grueling gauntlet to test the models’ brains…” a choppy and off-the-background-beat montage of models performing science projects, running around in circles with their heads stuck to baseball bats, doing cheerleader routines, and other brain-teasers (okay, “Can you spell “Nincompoop?”/”Can you use it in a sentence?” is pretty funny).

“With this level of competition and that many attractive people under one roof, there’s no doubt that things are gonna get heated!” You and I both hope, sister. If this thing falls flat, then you’ll have to go back to your day job managing a Bennigan’s while you try for another gig at a magazine “such as” Dell Crossword Annual or Rachel Ray Quilts! or whatever.

Anyway. enough about the intro, except to say that the opening animated graphic is totally cutting edge for 1985.

“We need more input. We gotta fill these things up with data. We gotta make them as real as possible. I want them to live, Wyatt. I want them to breathe. I want them to aerobicize.”

Scene one is in the Judgement Room. (They call it the living room, but there’s not much living going on there.) The models stand on a tiered staging area, opposite Mary Alice, who’s dressed in a super-conservative dark gray mennonite-cum-maharishi-looking getup that overshoots stylish by about a mile and a half and winds up in a sand trap. The nuclear symbol projected on the wall behind her head is a nice touch, though. She introduces “the most smartest man I know, Ben Stein!” and the models (and, it sounds like, the camera people and interns and whoever was eating in the commissary when they shot this) claps and hoots wildly as Stein comes out dressed as frumpy as possible. If Mary Alice’s outfit was a metaphorical driver where a 7-iron would have sufficed, Stein is putting from the tee. I have to believe this was intentional; he even dressed way better on Win Ben Stein’s Money. Hell, he probably dressed better when he was writing speeches for Richard Nixon.

Mary Alice, to the camera: “Ben is one of the smartest people I know.” I’m wondering what he did to lose his undisputed Mental Heavyweight Champeen title in her eyes since the last paragraph. I may be the only one who cares, but I can’t help it. I care.

I care.

First model speaking moment of the series: “Omigod, I am so excited to see Ben Stein! Ferris Bueller is like one of my most favorite movies.” Then he tries the “Bueller? Bueller?” line, and you know, as stupid as that line was supposed to have been originally delivered, when an actual idiot says it, it rings hollow. Turns out Stein could actually act after all. Once upon a time.

She explains the way the game works again, and she & Ben have clearly worked out a routine where whenever the grand prize comes up, they split the saying of it, so when Mary Alice says “One Hundred,” Ben chimes in with “Thousand,” before she continues with “Dollars.” It sounds like Dr. Evil is using Stephen Hawking’s speech board. Get used to it.

Model reaction montage: “Omigod, I could totally use a hundred thousand dollars!” “I come from money, and so when I heard about the 100,000 dollars, I thought (gasp!) Oh, cool!”

There’s also a modeling contract, apparently. Whatever.

One of the models was apparently unclear on how these shows work (if it’s just one, then they’re in better shape than — you know, scratch that line of thought): “When they announced that two people were going to be sent home, I was like, whoa, already?”

She then invites all the models to come down one by one to introduce themselves and their modelling and academic credentials. There’ a million of them, they’ve all got bachelor’s degrees and have done print and runway work, and we’ll get to know the interesting ones gradually anyways, but a few stood out:

Andre leaps out of the herd first. A mouthy sneering skinhead from Russia (sorry, “Soviet Union,”) he was clearly placed on the show as a heel. Five minutes in, and that much is clear. He jumps out first, jacket open, shirtless and with jeans cut low enough to show pubes, and calls Mary Alice “Mary Ellen,” and when she corrects him, he swears loudly and turns around to start again. He’s worked with clients “such as” DKNY & Bad Boy (which means LL Bean or the Franklin Mint), and there may be more but after talking about himself for six whole seconds he’s been distracted by how hot he is. He proclaims that he never works out, he’s just naturally blessed, like his Soviet ancestors. He’s not just a dick, he’s the Alpha Dick, and that’s the only reason he’s there. Which is fine. Every group reality show needs someone like Andre. Kudos to casting.

Of the rest, one’s too chiseled for Abercrombie, one took offense at being asked their weight, there were an awful lot of vaguely legitimate sounding colleges I’ve never heard of, but hey, an education is an education, right?

Gaston’s from Argentina, and in a room full of poodles, he’s the poodliest. His English is okay, but the editors have decided to subtitle everything he says, which may be cruel (I would not want to see, say, French subtitles of me speaking French; it would be terrible), but then again, he did ask for it.

There are two Rachels: Blonde Rachel looks like Nicole Kidman, kind of severe and older-then-she’s-letting-on, but Aussie Rachael is, on first look, the prettiest one in the whole room; she looks kind of like Barbara Feldon from Get Smart, which works for me, thanks. She has hips, though, which is bad for a model. We haven’t left the golden age of the 12-year-old boy in a fright wig with bolt-on tits being the great feminine ideal just yet.

There is a guy named Pickel. As a model, he’s the most successful so far; not a “such as” in his portfolio. It sounds like if you’ve cracked a magazine in the last year or two, you’ve probably seen him. But his name is Pickel. Not even Pickle. Pickel.

And then there’s Mandy Lynn. A Long Island girl with lopsided inner-tube lips and boobs to match, she’s a lingerie model who’s done some work with Playboy, and had some work in her face and chest area. She’s really out of place in this room of runway and catalogue experts, and somewhere in her dimly lit consciousness, she knows it. Mary Alice rips into her. “Darken the hair, hose down the makeup, and learn to walk,” she spits, disgusted.

After the commercial break, we’re still in the Judgement Room. She calls three of the models back down; Mandy Lynn, too-chiseled-for-Abercrombie guy, and some orange woman who Blonde Rachel cats into in voice-over. I hate Blonde Rachel already. Mary Alice speaks, which makes this moment exactly the same as the previous 15 minutes of the show. (It won’t all be this dense. I have neither the patience nor the stomach, and really the rest of the show doesn’t warrant this level of detail.) “I have serious doubts that you are the models I’m looking for, let alone America’s Most Smartest Model,” she somehow manages to say without laughing.

Ben chimes in. Finally. “I feel strongly that Mandy Lynn has a certain… spirit,” he says, his eyes never for a moment leaving her cleavage, his hands involuntarily making that double-boob-grab motion, “I’m pretty impressed that you learned how to build a website, and … and I think Mandy Lynn’s got it.” Mary Alice looks sideways at him, every ounce of her screaming you’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding. “You feel very strongly about Mandy Lynn, then.” “I like her,” Ben says, looking through his eyebrows in a grinchlike smirk that accents his huge old-man ears.

Cut to Mandy Lynn: “Ben is just so lovable! Like, you just look at him and you just wanna hug him!” (actually, her lips are so huge that it sounds like “Bem iv jusso lovabo, hike, you jussloogavim am you jusswanna mug him!”)

So Orange Girl (Jamie, if it matters) and too-cut-for-Abercrombie are “purged.” (Nice.) Now the show begins in earnest.

Ben announces that tonight’s first challenge will be a spelling bee. Everyone gets a dictionary on their bed.

All the other rooms are either all-boys or all-girls, but Andre seems to have wound up with three girls in his room. What a shock. “I’m rooming with two midgets and Pinnocchio.” He tells them he masturbates in his sleep, and they all squeal in mock horror, each of them tossing their hair at him. This is how horses mate in the wild, kids. Pay attention. You might need to breed them someday.

The first real obstacle? The bathroom & refrigerator doors have number locks on them. The combination codes are the answers to trivia questions, which is good news for me, because that makes this whole pointless exercise tangentially relevant to this blog. (Synergy & confluence, fuck yeah.) No one is allowed to pee until they come up with the answers to questions like “The year Christopher Columbus discovered America,” “The year the United States declared its independence,” and the hard one on the fridge, “The year America celebrated its bicentennial x 100.”

Everyone is losing their shit. There’s genuine grief over this stuff. Fourteen people, most of them American college grads, all of whom have read school books on topics “such as” The Declaration of Independence, the Europeans reaching North America, and how to add two zeroes onto a number to multiply it by 100. A crowd of them are standing around the bathroom yelling at the door, until Blonde Rachel dives in to start mashing away at the keypad. “Let her try!” “You’re trusting the blonde, bro!” Of course, once someone in the group figures it out, everyone goes in together. They may be morons, but they’re not stupid.

Everyone changes for evening (which in most cases just means taking off their shirts) and heads down to the pool, where there’s a spread of food that they all look at admiringly (except for Aussie Rachael, who sits down with a heaping plate and happily chows down) while they decide who’s going to be first in the hot tub. Mandy Lynn is actually the most dressed of everyone: “Maow I fink I meed to poove myfelf and work a wittle bit hodder van everybubby elf.” I kid her. She actually seems really sweet. She’s just not built to do a lot of talking. She skips out early to go upstairs and crack a dictionary for the first time in her life. Oh, the wonders she’ll find in there! I remember my first time.

A few people follow her upstairs for study time as well, leaving about half the group downstairs to flirt. Pickel and the two Rachels are single and trolling the group for action, while Andre sits separate from everyone. He, and I’ll type this sentence a few hundred times this year, is not impressed: “Blonde Rachel is a bag of bones, a set of implants, and an ugly blonde wig.” He lectures the group on why models are better than actors: “Fashion, it gives people a certain heart, a certain belief, a certain ‘we have to be better.’ Yeah, sure I could be fucking fat — let me finish! — I could be fat and I could read some stupid lines and eventually I’m going to memorize it and eventually I’m going to believe it!” Yeah, fuck you, Stanislavsky!

Blonde Rachel: “Talking to Andre was like talking to a frickin’ brick wall!” God, they are so going to schtup each other into kindling by Episode Four.

Andre’s on a roll. “I live in Times Square! I have a 6,000 dollar apartment! I have a rare dog, I have a gorgeous girl! I’m here for one simple reason, to prove people that models aren’t stupid, we world travel, we speak five six languages, and we have an unbelievable idea of what’s going on around us!”

Brett, of all people, blindsides the party with a moment of clarity. “Yeah, it’s a great life, it’s awesome, and we’re blessed, whatever, but it’s like the easiest, most fun job in the world, and we got lucky!” But Andre is undeterred. “We are the standard of lifestyle! People look up to us! On those billboards! They say, I want to be like that! People die to be us, bro!” And then later, to the camera: “Fifteen Americans against one Soviet. Hmm.”

Yeah, about that. They’re not all Americans. But more to the point, there aren’t any Soviets anymore, except in Fred Thompson’s mind. I know a lot of Russians, uh, “bro,” and while some of them were born in what was then the Soviet Union, they all kind of identify as Russian, or Kazakh, or Ukrainian, or whatever. There’s just a little too much Dolph Lundgren in Andre for me to believe this schtick. If his name is really, say, Andrew Rabinowitz, and he’s from, oh, Dayton, Ohio, I wouldn’t be shocked. That doesn’t mean he’s not an effective troll for the group, and the Scooby Doo gang sure isn’t ever going to find out his secret unless he screws up, but I’m ready to call bullshit on the whole Soviet Strongman thing. He’s trying way too hard for that to be real.

* * *

Next day, everyone’s out by the pool, “studying” for the Spelling Bee. They’ve all got little notebooks with words they had a hard time with, which is I guess how the Scripps-Howard kids do it, so while it’s easy to judge, who am I to say.

Gaston, the Argentinian poodle, isn’t studying, and doesn’t seem to care about anything other than trying to convince the girls to go topless, with not much success. “Nice hiney!” he calls out to one of the girls, who goes to the camera room to mention how she suddenly felt “objectified” by the remark. I wonder if anyone had the heart to let her in on the dirty little secret: objectification is the only reason any of you are there. That ship sailed a long time ago, sweetheart.

Everyone dresses for the Bee. Mandy Lynn apparently only brought really skimpy clothes and a tub each of foundation and lip gloss. Oh, and a paint roller to apply the stuff with. She does seem to get along with the other girls, though, who don’t see her as a threat to win and so they’re helping her out, hinting that maybe she should try on different outfits until she settles on a knee-length dress that looks like a red-white-and blue abacus. It’s louder than Andre’s ego, but it at least covers a reasonable amount of her skin, which at this point is the best she can expect. (Andre, by contrast, is wearing a shirt and tie with the sleeves ripped off. He looks like Larry the Cable Guy going to court.)

Down to the living room they go for the spelling bee. Ben drops the word bifurcated into the instructions, which baffles everyone in the room for thirty seconds until someone guesses its meaning correctly. One senses that Ben’s not naturally good with people. In case that wasn’t clear in the preceding thirty years.

The first part (see, it’s bifurcated!) is something called the Edge Challenge (which clearly hasn’t anything to do with the shaving cream of the same name, given the scruff on most of the guys), which is followed by the Callback Challenge, with harder words and a reward for the winner. Oh, and all the words are beauty and fashion related. Awesome. Dead looks all the way around the room.

Andre gets tripped up on “Retardant.” Mandy nails “Collagen.” (”Well awright, dey’re giving diff to me becauvve ov my lipf. And I’m like well, you know what, it’f not collagen, it’f filicone.”) Gaston the horndog Argentine gets “Nincompoop.” He had no chance whatsoever. Even Mandy Lynn laughs at him. Jesse (aka The One Black Guy) breezes through “Egocentric,” and that starts a montage of hits & misses. “Ageism.” “Augmentation.” “Electrolysis.” “Emaciated.” Down they go, one by one. Studying, oddly enough, doesn’t seem to have helped. Shocking, I know. Soon, they switch to names of designers. “Lacroix.” “Gaultier.” “Isaac Mizrahi.” Ping, ping, ping, fish in a barrel. A whole season of this awaits.

Jesse and Daniel are the last two, which was inevitable. They’re clearly the only two who have done any reading at all, the rest having only used books for balancing practice. Daniel gets “Phosphorescence,” “Variegated” and “Bacchanalian,” Jesse gets “Psoriasis,” but bails on “Dionysian,” giving Daniel the win. His prize? A tip-off on what he needed to know for the evening’s model competition. Something about knowing as many species of dinosaurs as possible. (You can see where this is going.)

Comic relief montage involving Gaston’s inability to talk to women. (”You ever do porn?” “No!” “Please?” “Umm, I’m going to go now.“) The other guys admire his confidence, but not his skill. It’s great, if only because these women have more than enough Get Out Of Being Hit On Fu to handle him.

Their first Callback Challenge involves the catwalk, so a runway coach named Krista is brought in to give the remedial class some tips. Erica walks like an army private, Mandy Lynn can’t stop walking sexy until she’s asked to imagine someone hurting her dog (”My dog! No one messes with my dog!”) Even the other trained models are just out of rhythm. Andre doesn’t practice. He just sits on the couch and talks trash at everyone, his accent fading in & out depending on how much he’s paying attention to what he’s saying.

Commercial break. An hour into the pilot. Two thirds of the way home. Hallelujah.

* * *

The home stretch begins with Mary Alice telling the models what the final challenge is all about. They’re to walk the runway while listing off as many examples of a given topic as possible. Daniel, for example, will be getting “kinds of dinosaurs.”

“I totally knew that was what was happening.”
- me, 20 minutes ago.

Mary Alice brought in a couple of friends to help her judge.

Everyone is dressed up and made up, which changes some of them kind of a lot. (Aussie Rachael looks less like Barbara Feldon now and more like Joanna Lumley, and not Avengers Joanna Lumley neither; more like AbFab Joanna Lumley. It’s not good.)

You know, I would think that keeping your mind occupied with something other than walking, even on (maybe especially on) the catwalk, would only help you walk more naturally, because you wouldn’t have the mental ability to think your way into awkwardness. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. VJ got “U.S. States” and came up with the Commonwealths of Memphis and Seattle, but at least he walked okay. Victoria, who allegedly has runway experience, got “Cities outside the U.S.” and couldn’t think of anything outside of Italy (you know, Tuscany isn’t actually a city, but everyone kind of let that slide), and wound up strolling instead of walking besides. Ben asked her if she’d ever been outside the US, and if she owned a map, and if she’d ever seen one, … nope.

Gaston got “Things that smell bad.” This had to be a setup. Armpit, fart, shoes, socks, turd, dirty penis, and he was out of time and runway. This is a direct transcription of the subtitles:

“Does it smell bad or not? Hey… something that smell bad is a dirty penis smells bad. I don’t know if they spected what I was about to say, but if they didn’t like that, they can suck it!”

Well, alright, then.

Mandy Lynn is up next. Her category? “Things that are round.” Her lips aren’t round, but I can think of two other things that are right… there. As can Ben, I bet. This was her list, in its entirety: “Balls, cherries, balloons, tires, balls, cherries, balloons, tires, balls, cherries, balloons, tires, balls, cherries, balloons, tires.” Once it was established that this was the first time she’d ever been on a runway with her clothes on, the panel just kind of pursed their lips and nodded sadly. One of the makeup guys suggested she try porn, which exasperated her, but what was she expecting? Even Ben, who clearly has chosen her as his personal favorite, turned to Mary Alice and said, “That was pathetic. I mean, why didn’t she at least say ‘Nipples?’”

One problem: they didn’t really show a lot of the different walks. The smart-model thing is a bit of a canard; one of the goals here is an hour of beefcake and cheesecake every week, and to that end, when they’re doing something modelesque, it would be good to have a running camera on them. There’s only so much mocking of these people we’re going to be able to do in one uninterrupted string before we start to pity them for the choices they’ve made in life. And you don’t want people truly pitying them. Show us their strengths a bit more. Their weaknesses will mean so much more.

Then Daniel comes on, and he looks like, well, like Nick Cave, with hair slicked back, black suit, open white collared shirt underneath. Mary Alice ripped into him, calling him one of the Sopranos. “It’s amazing that someone as smart as you could have such a poor sense of style.” I thought he looked fine, if a little severe, and I understand that the alleged fashion elite has never heard of Nick Cave (even though they steal his look in every issue of every magazine over the last ten years), but everyone was given the choice of two racks of clothes. There’s only so much style you can squeeze out of a rack of seconds from H&M. I should know.

Pickel is only wearing an open hoodie and a pair of trousers with a scarf hanging out of the back pocket. His topic: “Flowers.” He repeated the Mandy Lynn mistake of thinking of three flowers and repeating them over and over again, although at the end he blurted out “Amethapeel!” which doesn’t exist, but which is rendered in colored pencil by some child (Bullplopera stupidus) and dropped in over his explanations. I thought it was a good try. Dude, his name is Pickel. Cut him some slack. The judges thought he should try acting instead.

Andre has gone first every time so far, and now he goes last. I’m sure that was totally random, and there was no rhyme or reason to how they laid this out. “Things in the sky.” Sun, moon, gas, gases, and … that was all he could come up with. The judges didn’t like his walking either, which just made him seethe with rage. He’ll be seething a lot this year. And as he left, Ben turned to Mary Alice, and made a crack about the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China not being worried, and the whole panel cracked up. At least they’re having fun.

He comes back to the green room, and everyone ignores him, lost in their own narcissistic monologues with each other. Poor Andre. He’s there to go off on someone. That’s why he was placed on the show. Unfortunately, that’s the only time the show works. I suspect they’ll engineer it so that he stays on the show as long as possible.

Brett won the challenge, but at this point, that doesn’t mean much. It’s the first show. The first few episodes of any reality show consist of cutting the slow antelopes out of the herd, so if you have any social acuity and any chops whatsoever, you should be able to survive fairly easily through the first few rounds. Everyone seems to think Mandy Lynn is going to go because she’s not a runway model, but she really is nice to people; she’s just drawn that way.

* * *

(I’m so surprised, nay, shocked, that “I Love New York” is going to a second season. Really? She wasn’t able to find true love on TV? Really? That separates her from exactly nobody who’s ever tried. Not to mention she’s absolutely completely batshit insane, and her mother makes her look light a lighthouse. The only shock is that she’s still trying.)

* * *

Final scene. Mary Alice calls down the bottom three, two of whom are going home. Gaston Poodle Boy, Mandy Lynn and Victoria. (I didn’t realize how tall Victoria is until they put her beside Mandy Lynn, who admittedly might be eighteen inches tall.)

Mary Alice tells Gaston that it’s clear he doesn’t seem to care about the competition, and that his walk and attitude are terrible.

Then Mandy Lynn: “‘ight now I’m hopimg that see’th going to see zat I’m making appempts and taking that into comsideratiom.” Mary Alice mentions how she isn’t at all what this competition was supposed to be about, and that if it wasn’t for the fact that she really seems to want to do well, she’d be the first one out.

Then she turns to Victoria, who’s baffled by being in the bottom three. “I mean, I’m the tallest one here. This is supposed to be about modelling, right? Well, look at me, I’m a model!” Yeah, except no.

That said, she throws to Ben, who says, “Gaston and Victoria, like the leg bones of a cetacean mammal, you are now vestigial.”

A pause so long everyone forgets why they’re there in the first place, before Mary Alice puts them out of their misery: “This means you guys are gone. Goodbye.”

There’s the obligatory sour-grapes quote from each of them, and then they turn back to Mandy Lynn, who is clearly being set up as the Eliza Doolittle of the show. I don’t know how long she’s going to last, but if the editing is to be believed (and how could anyone ever make reality shows dishonest through editing, I mean, seriously?), she earned a chance with more than just Mary Alice and Ben. There are other models who clearly have grown to like her a little bit and want her to at least do well.

I was surprised that I managed to find three or four of these people who weren’t completely repulsive. Jesse seems smart and bitchy in a good way, Pickel isn’t gong to grow on me or anything, but — dude, his name is Pickel. And Aussie Rachael is the only one of them all that I think is actually genuinely pretty, so there’s that.

Next week’s episode is shorter, and there will be less expository stuff, so the recap next week should be about half the size of this one. If you’re still reading this, well, I owe you a beer.

Next: Episode 2 Recap >>

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