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Girls, a Pretty Voice Isn't Enough
Is there a more soul-crushing, dispiriting series on the air than America’s Next Top Female Voice?
Yes, the radio bands have been clogged with so-called “realism programs” of late, but some of them are true competitions of skill and intellect, such as Columbia’s The Survivalists and National Broadcasting’s Donald Trump Presents the Future Industrialists of America.
Still others are talent searches — as Top Voice claims to be — but manage to tap true talents. Take the massively popular You and the Fox Radiophonic Orchestra, in which the land’s best undiscovered singers battle for the vaunted position as the leader of an up-and-coming radio orchestra. Or the similarly themed Listen to Chamber Music With The Stars, in which a variety of well-known personalities take to the dance floor as we listen to the very same music that they do. Even Fox’s Police Polygraph!, in which captured criminals attempt to evade the questions of the authorities while strapped to a lie-detecting machine, suggests a certain degree of physical skill.
But America’s Next Top Female Voice does not reward skill. Like National Broadcasting’s Bank of America Presents What’s In The Briefcase?, it’s more a game of luck. Every season, a new collection of a dozen women are thrown together in a radio studio, and forced to read a series of increasingly unrealistic radio scripts that would never be read by any normal radio announcer. One by one, they must undergo a humiliating rejection at the hands of the show’s presenter, Miss Tyra Banks.
Banks — whose dulcet voice is just as perfect as her presumably blonde-haired, blue-eyed visage — surely knows that the ladies who have entered her contest can only use the voices they were gifted with by Dr. Mendel’s “genomics.” And yet the nation seems to spend twelve weeks every year riveted to their radios, curious about which girl will be the next to be dispatched due to no deficiency of spirit, nor of gumption, but merely of larynx.
Were these girls to be judged on something more worthy, such as their ability to rapidly clean a kitchen, or even how they fill out a tasteful swimsuit, we could see the entertainment in it. But something as superficial as their voices? The series’ fledgling broadcaster, the Columbia/Warner Network, should be ashamed. As should the golden-voiced Miss Banks.