New series review: The Agency (VH1)
02/19/07 02:26 PM
By ED BARK
At first blush it seems as though a bloated baldy named Pink will be the star browbeater of VH1's new The Agency.
First on camera in Tuesday night's premiere (Feb. 20 at 9 p.m. central), he sizes up prospective models with the deft touch of a paint-scraper.
Too fat, too short, too blah, too nah. And then one poor aspirant seems to embody all that Pink disdains.
"There's nothing I can do with you," he tells her. "Your face is asymmetrical. Your eyes are too close together and your nose is off on an angle like this. You want me to keep going? I mean . . . "
It's the coldest of cold opens on a half-hour series that promises to "cast an unblinking eye on the super high-stress jobs of the people who are completely hooked on the business of brokering beauty."
VH1 lately has taken the play away from MTV with pop-fizz attractions such as Flavor of Love, The Surreal Life (which it salvaged from The WB) and Best Week Ever. This up-close and impersonal look at Manhattan's Wilhelmina Modeling Agency looks like another surefire guilty pleasure. Inner beauty is out, plenty of skin is in. And we haven't even introduced the show's breakout star yet.
Profane, acerbic, hard-drinking Becky Southwick makes Pink seem like a strawberry shake. Even America's most famous British import, Simon Cowell, might find Becky a bit too bitchy for words. Early in Tuesday's Episode 1, she lays into slacker model Chloe, who looks as though a stiff breeze could blow her all the way to the Hamptons.
Still, Becky deems her a veritable "Pillsbury Dough Boy."
"You've got fatter," Chloe is told. "And I've just said the f-word."
This leaves Chloe near tears, even though she knows how it goes.
"There's no feeling involved in this business," Chloe says matter-of-factly. But don't take it personally or you'll be crushed like a bug.
Becky, clearly The Agency's breakout star, is a younger, nastier Janice Dickinson whose machete tongue must regularly be bleeped. Perhaps she symbolizes all that can be wrong with our Western World. As when telling another reed-thin model to drop 10 pounds because "I want you like a bloody stick next time. And toned!"
Or maybe Becky is just another of those ramped-up, highly entertaining, made-for-TV reality despots who puts snap and crackle into The Agency whenever the camera turns her way. In Episode 2, she cattily dismisses a modeling contest hopeful as having "a Jay Leno chin." So it infuriates her when a Wilhelmina colleague named Anita takes a liking to this wretched creature.
"Anita thinks the sun shines out of that girl with the big chin's ass!" Becky bellows.
If big-time modeling really works this way, then The Agency might be doing a public service by shining a light on it. But it's more likely that Becky Southwick
is a creature, if not a creation, of very selective editing. Surely she wouldn't agree that in real life she's little more than a banshee.
Could the series just as easily have made her into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm? Maybe so. But reality television isn't driven by happy mediums or a surfeit of nice, well-adjusted folks. Otherwise these shows wouldn't go on. Not that we'd really be any the poorer for it.
Grade: B-minus
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