My MTV: Tiara Girls

As should be evident from previous posts dedicated to MADE and 8th and Ocean, when it comes to MTV, I'm an easy customer to please. I'll lap up pretty much any reality show they toss my way. So this week I gave the new MTV series, Tiara Girls a test run. Sadly, I think my favourite network has let the rhinestone-encrusted crown slip a little on this one. This show falls so much short of MTV's usual sassy standards that I doubt I'll be able to eke out a two paragraph blog about it. But, this being a slow night, I'll give it a try.

I think Tiara Girls was doomed from the start for the reason that beauty pageants make too easy targets for the kind of pseudo-satirical/pseudo-documentary teen reality shows we've come to expect from MTV with shows like MADE and Super Sweet Sixteen. We know that pageants are weird. We can conjecture that the surreal sub-cultures in which they flourish are disturbingly bizarre. We expect that teenage girls competing in pageants are going be spouting off the kind of anti-feminist remarks that would earn them a lot of furrowed brows and angry headshakes if they were appearing on Oprah. So when we see all these easily-anticipated elements come together on an episode of Tiara Girls, the result is just...yawn.

Maybe it's just that I personally find pageants unexciting. Growing up in Canada, it seemed pretty clear that pageants were a foreign phenomenon, and they didn't really hold all that much fascination for me (I was too busy idolizing Elizabeth Manley). These days, I find them to be one of the most tired feminist bad objects out there. Whether the world keeps turning with or without pageants doesn't really matter--either way, 99.9% of its problems are still going to go on unsolved.

Despite my negative review, I'm not really saddened by the lack-lustre appeal of Tiara Girls. This just means I'll have more time to keep up with my other MTV favourites. Really, my TV viewing schedule was getting packed as it was, especially having to fit various play-off games in. If you get a chance to check the show out, give it a try and tell me what I'm missing. Or not. It's really not as fun as MTV should be.