Memory Lane: ANTM is Dead, Long Live The New ANTM

America is hot for second chances right now. Netflix resurrected Gilmore Girls and Arrested Development for bonus seasons and exhumed Full House, and the Star Wars franchise bore prodigious (and attractive) fruit. A MacGyver refresh and a TV reincarnation of Lethal Weapon are on TV, Spiderman cannot stop rebooting, Superman won’t take time off, and The Fantastic Four even took a stab at breaking off a piece of that action (although those are all more so that the studios can retain the long-term rights, but still). Girl Meets World even continued Boy Meets World, despite my near-complete confusion as to where the demand was for more Cory and Topanga. And now, America’s Next Top Model joins the ranks of the undead. TV zombies: They’re not just for AMC anymore.

America’s Next Top Model is a fond subject for me. You may recall us mentioning that I worked on a bunch of the early seasons, but you likely don’t know that Go Fug Yourself was partially born in that office during season three. In the nascent days of our little online in-joke, I would sit at my desk in the corner of the story office — while Jess was across town on her show, American Candidate — and sneak up a post or two while on a break from watching tapes of Eva the Diva and Ann and Norelle (and Yaya speaking Portuguese on the phone, despite specifically being asked not to because we didn’t have translators who could vouch that she wasn’t breaking confidentiality). Neither of us ever imagined anyone besides our friends and maybe family would ever read this goofy side project, and then suddenly I was leaving work early to go meet Joan Rivers, and we were off and running.

My relationship was born there, too. I both started dating (season two) and got engaged to (season five) my husband in those offices, because hey, if you fall in love in an edit bay, you might as well pop the question there. Looking back, I can’t figure out why the sight of him in sitting at his Avid in a suit and tie didn’t ring any alarm bells. Later, a colleague randomly started a joke rumor that I was four months pregnant with twins, which another coworker actually believed because he saw me walking in the hall looking “kind of shlubby and tired.” (We are still speaking. I thought it was funny.) (It’s true that I was eating a lot of Pop Tarts and craft service muffins at this time.) And when the prank turned into prophecy and I actually did become pregnant with twins, and indeed up to the day before I had them, my husband was still on the staff. So you could even say, in a way, that my kids were born there too.

As were a small handful of careers, and other memorable faces. (If you click on the photo, a story drops down. GROOVY.)

The above are just a couple women I remember, for one reason or another, but I could honestly have listed another dozen (Ann, Eva, Norelle, Coryn, Kim, Kahlen, Brittany, April, Yoanna, Wholahay, Natasha, Jaslene… it goes on). Others have faded a little over time, something I never thought possible. I used to be able to tell you exactly who got eliminated and when and why, and who stood next to her when it happened. Still, there have been a gratifying handful of moments that, unbelievably, people still remember and reference as clearly as if they happened yesterday. Like anything Jade did, or the entirety of Tiffany — her getting into a barfight during casting in cycle three, returning in cycle four, then emotionally quitting and getting reamed in the infamous Tyra Flips Her Weave scene — and of course the legendary “Respeito” fight starring YaYa. Or that time in cycle four that everyone thought Michelle had a flesh-eating disease but it was actually impetigo. And don’t forget Moderately Blind Amanda. I can’t remember if this made it into the show, but it’s been 13 years so I’m going to take a risk and share it: Our story team full-on wore out the VHS tape — yes, VHS — of the moment that Amanda, mistakenly thinking she’d been eliminated in casting, gathered all the girls for a long and tearful farewell which she delivered in the form of a lengthy beat poem about life and blindness and her child and Assorted Meaningful Meaningfulness.

ANTM may never have topped giving the girls bikini waxes in the very first season. But it tried. We had nude and gender-bending and controversial ethnicity-tweaking photoshoots. There was the infamous Shandi cheating scene, and how your heart may have broken a little when she called to tell her boyfriend, or when Lisa D’Amaton drunkenly talked to a plant (and, in a cameo that amuses me to this day, she also gave deep sass and a behind-the-back eyeroll to my husband). And who DID eat Bre’s granola bars in cycle five? And when Jade promised she would write a book someday, so that Furonda could read it and learn something, can we hold her to that? I loved Furonda, but I really loved Jade. When she rapped her way out of the house, snapping her fingers, it was Tyra’s brainwave to have Jade zap herself of the group shot — disappearing in a blink timed to her own snaps — instead of fading out like everyone else. A perfect moment.

Oh, and let’s all pour some out for Melrose.

I fell away from ANTM in what I refer to as its teen years. The so-called Short Girls cycle, which I believe is thirteen, is the last one my husband worked on, during his hiatus from Chuck. Roughly six hours after he got home from the Hawaii shoot, the beans decided they wanted to be Tauruses rather than Virgos; once we got through both my labor and watching the fruits of his, we drifted away. Possibly because, let’s be honest, it was never going to get more dramatic or more personal for us than that. I heard the seasons with men were entertaining — there was a BEARD WEAVE involved! — but I never reconnected with my onetime love, and it got cancelled shortly thereafter.

Until now: In case you missed the uproar (and all Rita’s questionable fashion choices while they shot in New York), Top Model is being resurrected on Dec. 12 by VH-1 with Rita Ora as the host, and Ashley Graham as one of the judges. Some very short musical promo reels have started coming out for the new show, which are clearly trying to give it a poppier, sexier, occasionally grittier feel.

This second one features the new judges briefly, as well.

There are two montages of the new contestants, but this one has more actual photos in to look at than the first one. It’s also nine minutes long, though, so here’s the shorter one if you prefer (the music on that one sounds like someone adapted the backing track for Tyra’s seminal pop song, “Shake Ya Body,” and yes, I know this because that song is totally on my workout mix).

I don’t know what any of this means for the actual look and feel of a show; you can cut anything into a stylish mini-movie if you want to, but there is no way to tell whether the format of the show will feel hipper than its aging predecessor. Maybe, after some odd experiments here and there with incorporating social media, it will be a return to basics — that old season one magic, where judging happened in a tiny, cramped room that looked like a decorated broom closet.

Can Rita Ora possibly live up to TyTy’s legacy? Can Ashley Graham ever match the skeptical facial configurations of Janice Dickinson? If you were ever watching, will you continue? If you were never watching, will you start, if only to play Spot The Rita Ora Outfit We Already Hated? Or will you Netflix the glory days and live forever in that divine dream space that is Jade’s first CoverGirl commercial? “Wonderful, fabulous,” she cooed, twirling like a socialite who thinks her life is a musical. If only it had become one.

Maybe VH-1 can help with that, too.