Say It Ain't So, Tyra!

Girl Pow... er?

Well, I am just beside myself. Of all the horrible things to happen this holiday season (even the ones the authorities don't know about), the worst has to be the recent announcement that Tyra Banks, Queen of All Life in Perpetuity, is dropping her daytime talk show after five glorious seasons. What will the world do without T-dawg and her delightfully schizophrenic program? It's almost as if daytime TV is finally falling to pieces like the soulless leper it has been for decades. The soaps are stagnating, The View has resorted to hiring people who openly mock the show's format, and soon American television prior to primetime will have a serious dearth of sassy black women to be all sassy and give away free cars as sassily as possible.

Oh, but I will miss Tyra infinitely more than Oprah. For one, there's no way Oprah is actually disappearing. If anything, the end of her talk show is a sign that she's moving onto the next stage of her monstrous transformation into a leviathan of pure consumerist mediocrity, shameless pandering and wanton self-absorption. Tyra Banks, on the other hand, doesn't really have her spiky tentacles of pure contempt wrapped around any particular industry. She's no media empire, she's just a case study into the importance of anti-psychotic medication propped up on a pair of high heels that I'm pretty sure are classified as deadly weapons in every state except for Idaho and Alabama. With her talk show on ice, Tyra may very well cease to be part of the cultural landscape.

Unlike some of her supermodel contemporaries, Tyra Banks doesn't really have any marketable talents beyond her particular brand of unfiltered crazy. Milla Jovovich is now considered a mostly serious actress and Cindy Crawford is by all accounts a successful business manager. As for Tyra, she's going to be in a world of hurt when she realizes that there's currently no demand for an eye-gouging harpy who scares children and vacillates between putting on silly costumes and promoting immature You-Go-Girl!-ism like it's 19-freaking-97.

As for her specific plans, Tyra is heading up Bankable Studios, a movie production company with the vague mission of bringing "positive images of women to the big screen". In principle that sounds like a noble cause, but there are two snags in it as far as I'm concerned. First, Tyra Banks herself is not a positive image of women. She's a dangerously thin, notoriously cruel materialist who has made a mint reinforcing the same old gender roles that have always been in place by repackaging them as hip and modern. Second, whenever arts and entertainment have a specific social goal behind them, they invariably become insufferable garbage. Since her mentor in film is Tyler Perry, the guy who has based his entire career on projecting African American stereotypes with nary a hint of irony, I'd say the chances of Bankable Studios making even one decent movie are pretty slim. It's more likely that it'll churn out some awful hybrid of Lifetime Originals and Sex and the City.

There is, however minuscule, a possibility that Tyra will translate the giddy insanity of her talk show into a series of unintentionally grotesque films that will go down in history as platinum 21st century camp. Here's hoping Tyra keeps that crazy dial turned up to 11 as she ventures into the world of cinema.