AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL premiered last night and aside from singing the Love Boat theme all night, I couldn’t have been happier. Top Model is now in its 9th season and while they’ve had some ups and downs over the years, I’ve always felt that the show is highly entertaining and the cast of characters they gather are usually worth their waifish weight in gold.

This year they took 33 semi-finalists, put them on a cruise ship and set sail for sandy beaches. Miss J was their lovely cruise director and she had them working the ship’s track as a catwalk. We quickly learned that while a couple of those sticks could strut it on the runway, many of these girls could barely walk a straight line. One’s a hunchback, another pigeon toed, seriously it’s amazing some of these girls can walk down the street.

There’s nothing better than Miss J imitating girls who can’t walk. They must want to kill themselves after that. She’s a trip!

Tyra on the other hand needs to tone it down. Since she decided to “retire” from modeling she’s gone from curvy to fat back to curvy then straight to crazy. She decided that her entrance this year would be a Vegas style showgirls number. It was nauseating. Hell one of the girls threw up (okay so that was a different time and she had sea-sickness but that’s beside the point).

Boston was very present in the semi-finalists (3 girls), as were the egomaniacs ala Jade. But in true Top Model fashion, getting too invested in these girls in the first episode is always a mistake. After Tyra, Miss J and Jay interviewed and tortured these girls at high sea, there was a quick beach front photo shoot with Cycle 8 winner Jaslene in the house (girl still sounds as deaf as Marlee Matlin but who am I to judge).

Then it was time for them to make the first round of cuts. 33 went to 20 in the blink of an eye. I apparently blinked some more because aside from people calling Ebony out as this years most hated girl, I don’t remember much until the finalists were revealed.

On a clear catwalk above the ships pool was where Tyra widdled it down from 20 to the Top 13. Why do I love watching these cocky and sadly average girls get knocked down? There’s nothing better than watching a girl who thought she was the next Naomi Campbell crying her eyes out because she has to go back home to her job at the DQ like the rest of the world. Cry girls, cry because it makes my night to see you sobbing on that screen.

I’m happy to say that all of my favorites made it and move on to compete for the title of America’s Next Top Model.

Who are my Top picks? That’s a hard one because with only that one photo shoot under their belt, its hard to tell what they’ll look like post-makeover — which means I’m basing this on their mousy before photos. That being said, I’m banking on the odd girls this year. Victoria, Heather, and Jenah.

But there are some beauties as well that I’d like to see go further, like Saleisha or Lisa.

In other words, it’s too hard to tell who could win AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL Cycle 9.

*Check out all the ANTM Cycle 9 Contestants at my earlier post revealing the cast.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 3:58 am and is filed under Tyra Banks, Premiere, The CW, ANTM, Ducky Does TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.