Should ‘Top Model’ have an All-Star season?

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Q: Do you think that “America's Next Top Model” will ever have an 'all-star' cycle?    —Sarah, Buffalo, N.Y.

A: Andy says: While I generally think all-star seasons are a bad idea, I hope The CW and the show's producers will some day have an all-star season of "Top Model." (For the record, there's been no official or unofficial talk of such a show.)

In the early days of reality TV, I'd get excited about even the possibility of an all-star season; who wouldn't want to see their favorite (and, to be honest, their most hated) contestants return for an epic showdown?

In reality, though, these seasons tend to disappoint, starting with "Survivor All-Stars." "The Amazing Race All-Stars," which is currently airing, has done nothing so far but injure the reputations of its teams. Rob and Amber, for example, started strong but went from first place to last place, challenging their reputation among some as the best competitors ever.

But "Top Model" seems different. The show is designed to take the girls from regular person to supermodel; they're not expected to have perfected the art of modeling when they walk in the door. The all-stars, then, would be models who'd made it through basic Tyra training. An all-star season would show us something different and new; it wouldn't just be people playing the same game all over again. The winners and runners-up could face off (perhaps even against some of the losers) to see if they'd really learned anything about modeling.

In addition, the show has plenty of strong personalities who would likely clash with one another. But most significantly, "Top Model" is all about Tyra being a crazy mother to the models, and the often insane photo shoots they concoct for the models. Even with familiar faces, those would still provide plenty of entertainment.

Gael says: I can understand a few reasons why "Top Model" might not want to do an All-Star season. Some of their gimmicks — teaching klutzes to walk in heels, shaving off some poor beauty-pageant winner's hair, making sheltered young women pose almost nude -- wouldn't work very well after the models have already been through a complete season.

But I'd love to see it happen, and I'd love to see Shandi Sullivan from season two come back. The Walgreen's clerk who both blossomed into a bit of a swan and also caused a memorable train wreck by confessing to her boyfriend that she'd cheated is my favorite "Top Model" ever.

Q: Who audits the results of “American Idol” to make sure the contestants voted off are indeed those with the lowest votes? According to DialIdol.com, one of the girls received 0 votes but was not kicked off. I understand that DialIdol is completely non-scientific, but this seems awfully suspicious.    —M., Chicago

A: You are correct: DialIdol's results are not scientific. Therefore, they can't really be used to measure anything at all. As DialIdol notes, its results "[were] 87% accurate for season 5 of American Idol." So far this season, the voting has been so close that nearly all contestants have been marked as being at risk for elimination during each of the three semi-final weeks.

For those unfamiliar with it, DialIdol is a Web site that offers a downloadable autodialer program. The program will call your favorite contestant's phone number for you, and at the same time, it reports back to the site about the frequency of busy signals it receives. It uses that data -- from "almost 600 people," according to the site -- to predict which contestants are in trouble; the busier a line is, the more people are voting, and the safer that candidate is -- or at least, that's the idea.

In other words, it's not a measurement of the number of votes a contestant receives. With 30+ million votes being registered by the show, you can bet every contestant gets at least one vote, if not hundreds.

Regarding actual auditing of the voting, FOX says an independent company handles tallying the votes every week. However, as I've written about before, the show refuses to release vote totals, and that just fuels conspiracy theories. If the show actually released vote totals, people might still question them, but at least we'd have more information.    —A.D.

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