Image courtesy of ABC

ABC opened this year’s batch of new reality television series without much of a bang, premiering True Beauty last night, a show co-produced by reality TV gurus Tyra Banks and Ashton Kutcher. The show aims to determine from a group of ten contestants who are each objectively beautiful on the outside, who is “truly” the most beautiful, both externally and within. The winner of the show is guaranteed to win one hundred thousand dollars, and will be featured in People Magazine’s fifty most beautiful people issue. The catch is this: the contestants think they are only being judged on how beautiful they are on the outside.

True Beauty pales in comparison to the reality series previously created by the co-producers of the show, such as Kutcher’s popular celebrity prank show on MTV, Punk’d, and Banks’ well received series on the CW, America’s Next Top Model. Unlike the aforementioned shows, the appeal of True Beauty is not as simple to pinpoint. Determining contestants’ inner beauty by seeing how they react to having drinks spilled on themselves is not as exciting as watching Allen Iverson react to being told that he cannot enter his own birthday party, a prank from a show on Punk’d. The ephemeral moments of fame the winning contestant will gain by being featured in People Magazine one time does not match in magnitude the potentially lifelong glory of launching a career in modeling, as the winner of America’s Next Top Model does.

In the premiere episode, the ten aspiring contestants visit a doctor who is tauted as an expert on beauty. He quantifies each person’s beauty on a scale from one to one hundred by measuring characteristics such as the evenness of their faces, and the thinness of each of their lips. Next to the chair in which each waits to be examined lies a pile of the private files of their competitors. Unbeknownst to them, there is a hidden camera planted in that room (surprise, surprise). While each contestant waits, the three hosts (Vanessa Minillo, Cheryl Tiegs, and Nole Marin) watch to see who will leaf through their competition’s personal files. If a contestant does look at the files, he/she fails that test of inner beauty.

Hidden challenges of inner beauty such as these are scattered throughout the show, many of them occurring while the contestants reside in their mammoth, extravagant mansion. In the first show, a girl was eliminated for acting unkind, invasive, and disrespectful. Once eliminated, the judges explained that she was being judged on not just her outer beauty. She was then shown clips of times in which her lack of inner beauty was most evident.

This premiere does not foreshadow a good future for the first (and most likely only) season of True Beauty. The concept of “true beauty” is a theme apparently too trite to revolve a successful reality show around, and because there lacks a palpable appeal to the show, it does not look as though Banks and Kutcher will be able to strike new reality TV gold this year.