Tyra

However pink it may be, Tyra is exemplary of FOX’s more explicit propagandas. In it, Tyra Banks reigns over a Kingdom of Perpetual Twilight, or possibly a Ross Dress For Less, where every day and night, aggrieved people are brought before her and made to participate in elaborate show trials. With or without phony judge attire, it’s an arbitration show at heart. There is a moral, and Tyra intends to sermonize us good.  She’s a TV priest and it’s Television’s Rightful Burden to shed positivity on every unconquered corner of our consciences.

For example, she calls the sex workers in. One brings her pimp and together they defend prostitution in the shadiest, most uncomfortable way imaginable. The next is a stripper, looking eerily like a waxworks Barbie, with a weepy, harrowing story of her inability to escape a strip joint. Tyra goads the guests toward one another, stoking the crying woman for infectious tears, and by the middle of the sob story has the audience crying too. No doubt she eventually gets what she wants: a crying prostitute and an angry pimp to shout down. And no doubt that when she does, she pulverizes him. She is on a mission.

It would be one thing to have a mission and succeed. But that can be difficult, whereas acting like an asshole is really easy.

Okay, wait. My words got away from me. We do know that Tyra is a genuinely compassionate person and not an asshole. For example, she once dressed in a fatsuit to document what fat women experience, in order that she could call their hideously reduced expectations to public scrutiny and then goad them about it. As a “fat woman,” she went on dates with three social-climbing Los Angeles pricks, all of whom Heel Face Turned when they were told  her real identity. Tyra was shocked; they so hated fat women that they would rather date famous models?

Her dates were complete muppets, chosen for maximum muppetude. So, that part’s really not shocking – just more of the usual “reality” theater.

What was bizarre was this: after Tyra regained her royal raiment and resumed the fortress to share her wisdom, and in the middle of accounting an experience in which people on the city bus didn’t bow and scrape at her like she was a famous model, she began crying. This is the life of a fat woman: a sad, gray life where horny people don’t point hundred-watt insincere smiles at you all the time. Why don’t all less-than-marketably-gorgeous people just kill themselves? It all makes you begin to wonder how well Tyra understands the world of humans.

As usual with TV, and especially as usual with FOX, the superficial silliness nearly conceals a more fundamental stupidity.

I mean, wouldn’t an audience – even assuming charitably that they were dumb as bricks and deeply into the crusade for positive energy – feel a little bit weird taking moral marching orders from someone this brassy and clueless? Normally, as I understand it, religious figures are expected to engage in some kind of authenticity claim. What’s hers? Can you think of one?