MOMMY AND ME The CW's latest
This holiday season, use all your available wishes to help bring the writers' strike to an end, because if the new reality show Crowned: The Mother of All Pageants is any indicator, not even near-nude gems of Southern culture can save us from the drivel ahead. In what can only be described as the absolutely hottest Southern mess, Crowned makes its nauseating debut on the CW this week (Dec. 12).

Carson Kressley (trading one sagging reality franchise, Queer Eye, for another), Shanna Moakler (who won some pageant that nobody remembers but who was also on a recent season of Dancing with the Stars), and Cynthia Garrett (who nobody knows at all) host Crowned, a low-budget program tapped to keep fans of Gossip Girl from abandoning the network during down time. The project might have looked to any number of reality-show competitions and cribbed notes on how to create enthralling drama, but unfortunately this show would rather make an earnest attempt to convince you to care about the real-life drama and heartaches of mother-daughter teams competing for a pageant crown—because it's their last chance for happiness. For real.

Pageantry is nice and all, but there's a reason people tune in to watch Miss Universe: beautiful women traipsing about in next to nothing so that women can aspire to be them, men can aspire to sleep with them, and gay men can aspire to be in their entourage. While the majority of the girls on Crowned are beautiful, they're not television beautiful—they're scary, Nicole Kidman-esque plastic "beautiful." The kind of peculiar beauty that inspires nightmares rather than dreams.

The show makes a beeline for the Ugly Betty crowd as well, adding a notably less attractive team into the mix, "The Tomboy Queens," who go on to commit such pageant fouls as actually—gasp!—eating the food provided by producers. It makes for lame-brained almost-drama. (Could nobody have stopped absurd team names like "Silent But Deadly," "Skin Deep," and "Red Bombshells"?) In the end, the lasting question seemed to be whether or not the two black teams on the show were actually in the competition, or if their 10 seconds of screen time simply meant that their footage was spliced in after the fact. Low-carb food for thought!