Challenges I Think Would Have Worked Well On America’s Next Top Model

I have been unemployed for such a long time now! When you are unemployed you somehow have a crushingly huge amount of free time that always seems to vanish right when you try to use it for something such as cleaning the house or taking up jogging. At the same time, Content will begin to flood your attention, roosting on your roof like all those owls bothering the Dursleys in that first Harry Potter movie.

So far this time I have watched all three versions of Traitors, and before that I watched a YouTuber play through every Five Nights At Freddy’s installment (still unclear why I did this). But now I’ve returned to one of my old high school mainstays: large-scale PsyOp/modeling competition reality show, America’s Next Top Model.

There is not a shortage of media covering this series’ veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of crimes, both cultural and psychological. Over the course of the show there is not one but TWO discrete incidents where the girls have a modeling challenge themed around pretending to be corpses immediately after one of the contestants has learned about the death of a loved one.

I recently watched a season where the girls lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house which, while beautiful, is almost certainly the site of the famous Black Dahlia murder. I will say this about the psychological tactics of this show: they are deep, and they are varied.

Each cycle, one model is picked to receive the ugliest hairstyle of all time which tanks her psyche and knocks her out of the competition within a few weeks (at which point Tyra usually admits “I thought the haircut would push you to do better but I guess it did the opposite”), and more than once this terrible hairstyle has caused actual injury!

I have one specific knot in the synapses of my brain that I can attribute 100% to the episode in Cycle 2 where Tyra has each girl’s measurements and weights taken and read out on camera. It was very brave of them to not limit the psychological damage to the contestants on the show but to instead make sure to spread a little of it to every little girl in America ❤.

All that to say, I know this show doesn’t exist anymore (potentially due to intervention from the Justice Department) but if it did I think I have some ideas for how to really take it all the way.

1. They do that thing from the first Kingsman movie where Tyra gives everyone a puppy to raise and then the last challenge they have to kill the puppy to establish their fealty to The Fashion Industry (anyone who refuses will be accused of Not Wanting It bad enough; anyone who attempts to comply will be reprimanded because To Be In Fashion You Have To Follow Your Heart)
2. They announce the season’s winner in the final episode only for all the walls of the judging room to fall away, revealing that the winner is actually the WORST model of them all, causing her to have a full mental break (motives on this one are something about the Perils of Overconfidence)
3. Challenge where anytime any of the models fail to project confidence Miss J shoots them with a paintball gun; challenge is sponsored by The Armed Forces
4. Shoot where they put all the models in the Monica from Friends flashback fat suit. Lots of talk about how empathetic it’s making them all feel. Season’s sole “”Plus Sized”” (size 6) model eliminated this episode.
5. Tyra welcomes to the show the first ever model who’s actively in the Witness Protection Program
6. Everyone goes on a field trip to the gigantic Funko Pop landfill and is forced to make their own showstopping ensembles out of the refuse
7. “Sexy” themed lingerie shoot where the woman with the biggest bust size is eliminated for looking too cheap; reward is getting unsupervised dinner with the bassist from Maroon 5 who is also judging the competition
8. One full episode where they just do the Stanford Prison Experiment. There’s not even a photographer present. No one knows why they’re doing this.
9. Nursing Home Day: the contestants are brought to a nursing home where Tyra and her team have rounded up the dirtiest perverts they could find on the premises. The girls’ task is to make conversation with these men for six hours as they are told this is more or less exactly what casting calls will be like.
10. On Makeover Day two contestants get Face/Offed with each other (production does not cover the cost of reversing the Face/Off procedure after the show is over)
11. Sexy Baby themed photoshoot collab with Pampers. I know this might seem like a stretch but they literally have done Sexy High School Student Themed Shoot so I’m just extrapolating from there.

The individual concepts for this shoot involved “geek (pictured left),” “class flirt (on the right)” and “school bad girl” which is like the class flirt but outside. I’m being deadly serious this all happened.