For the first time in its 50-year television history, the fabled Miss America beauty pageant won't run on one of the major networks when it airs Saturday night.
Instead Nashville-based Country Music Television will be doing the honors — from Las Vegas, not Atlantic City, another first in Miss America history.
Last year, CMT paid an undisclosed amount for broadcast rights to the show for 2006 and 2007, with options extending through 2011. ABC had dumped the faded beauty queen in 2004 amid the pageant's lowest television ratings in its history when it drew 9.8 million viewers, down from about 33 million in 1988. For comparison's sake, a recent episode of the Monday night CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother drew in 9.5 million viewers.
Now, Viacom-owned CMT is laying down a big-dollar bet that it can restore some luster to the Miss America pageant, a spectacle that captured the collective imagination of as many as 85 million viewers during its heyday in the early 1960s.
..."'Our audience is very uncynical — in a completely refreshing way,' he said. 'They're inherently optimistic, and I think that they believe in tradition and they believe in the power of institutions. Looking at it through that prism, the Miss America Pageant seemed like a perfect fit for CMT.'"
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