America’s Next Top Model 10 debuts tonight

Tyra Banks and company return for the tenth cycle of America’s Next Top Model tonight at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.

This season is the first for judge Paulina Porizkova, who replaces Twiggy. She will apparently return to the Janice Dickinson school of criticizing the models, rather than the Twiggy school of being kind and caring to the models.
“I want to be the one going, ‘This is not working. What delusions are you under here?'” she told the New York Post, saying that producers “obviously don’t take girls based on who can actually be a model. … I look at the girls and think, ‘How are you gonna make a model out of that?’ … As soon as [the producers] called me, I was like, ‘You know that this is what I think about the show, and that I refuse to lie, right?’ And they were like, ‘That’s why we want you.'”

On the occasion of the 10th season, Entertainment Weekly checks up on 12 past models and the genesis of the show, which finds that Tyra “is still actively involved in even the smallest details, like the show’s opening montage of the contestants. Viewing one poorly lit model’s visage, Banks exclaims, ‘She’s getting nasal labia folds!’ and then tosses out directives like ‘Let’s use a sepia tone’ and ‘Desaturate the color.'”

Tyra also says that she had no idea the show would last this long. “I thought it was going to last for two seasons. Around season 5, I said, ‘Ken [Mok, the show’s executive producer], how far can we go — 8?’ He goes, ‘I’m thinking 10.’ Now we’re at 10 and not stopping.”