The Miss America pageant was the very definition of appointment television not so long ago, but changing cultural times have put the venerable institution on life support. The pageant lost its network television deal several years ago and has spent most of the time since in a death rattle of increasing desperation: moving from its Atlantic City home to Las Vegas, and from September to the dead of winter, and from ABC to CMT and now to TLC.

In preparation for this year's pageant, which airs Saturday night at 8:00 ET, Miss America and TLC collaborated on a four-week reality show called Miss America Reality Check. The show surprisingly began by acknowledging that the pageant's worst critics had a point: yes, it had become hopelessly stuck in the past, with winners who come across as a generation behind the times. The alleged purpose of Reality Check was to strip away the retrograde tendencies that the contestants had picked up during their journey up the ladder of local and state competitions.

While the show has gotten the sort of ratings you would expect for something airing at 10:00 on Friday nights, it has accomplished one useful thing, which is establishing some of the contestants as personalities in their own right who viewers of Reality Check will want to pay attention to. Before now, none of the Miss America contestants ever had any sort of national profile prior to the pageant itself, and outside of wanting to support the representative of one's own state, there was no reason to have a rooting interest in anyone. But people who are coming into Saturday's telecast having watched the women for four weeks will no doubt now have favorites that they are following.

But in two crucial ways Miss America Reality Check has not fulfilled its potential. The first problem is that with 52 women in the pageant and only four hours of the reality show to work with, Reality Check hasn't introduced viewers to very many of the contestants. While all the women are seen competing in various challenges, pretty much the only ones who have been singled out as individuals are the three designated as the best of the week and the three deemed the worst. That amounts to just sixteen women in three weeks (two of the contestants have been named both best and worst at different times). Hardly anyone else has been heard speaking or even been referred to. If you're a fan of Miss Montana, Miss New York, or Miss Louisiana, your first view of them is going to come when they walk down the runway at the pageant, the same as if there had never been a reality show.

While one of the potential draws of Reality Check would seem to have been the chance to use the show as a means of scouting potential winners, not being able to focus on even half the contestants makes that difficult. The show has not dealt with talent at all, and talent is still an important component in determining the eventual Miss America. The winner of the pageant's preliminary talent competition, Miss Massachusetts Valerie Amaral, has not appeared on Reality Check to this point. But we have seen the women running across balance beams with little cups of water, and answering quiz questions Jeopardy!-style, neither of which has much to do with the pageant or anything else.

Another issue is that while the show has beaten us over the head with the idea that Miss America is changing for the times, and that Reality Check should be seen as a means of deprogramming the contestants and ridding them of bad habits, it's still not clear exactly what they are referring to and what they now expect of the women. The pageant is still going to contain the time-honored elements of talent, interview, evening gown, and swimsuit -- sorry, "lifestyle and fitness." True, there does seem to be an effort at getting the girls to give up the helmet hair and the worst excesses of the evening gowns. But telling the contestants that they are now to abandon the stereotypical stiff pageant walk in favor of a runway-like model strut doesn't seem like a major difference, let alone the sort of thing that will persuade those who have given Miss America up for being irrelevant that they should come back to the fold.

Also, the show has been inconsistent about enforcing the so-called modern image of Miss America. At one point, we saw the judges taking Miss Idaho Sadie Quigley to task for having hair that made her look like a senator's wife -- exactly the sort of advice about not coming across as old-fashioned that we should have expected to see. But that has been the exception. In the first episode, Miss Vermont Rachel Cole was placed in the bottom three not long after viewers had noticed her taking views on social issues at odds with the conservative image of pageant contestants. Cole was also told, in so many words, that she was too plain looking.

The show has also seemed to go out of its way to beat down any sense of irreverence in its participants. The surest path to the bottom three so far has been doing something that's perceived as silly or overly flamboyant, which has tripped up Cari Leyva, Miss Alaska, and Diana Reed, Miss Iowa.

Most interesting is the case of Jill Stevens, Miss Utah. Stevens is not only gorgeous in the traditional pageant sense, but is a former combat medic. A more fitting symbol of the new image of Miss America would be hard to imagine. And yet, Miss America Reality Check has portrayed her as being out of her element. During the first week, she placed in the top three, but was told she needed to play up her glamorous side a little more. The next week, she had some fun with that advice and showed up for a challenge wearing heavy makeup and gaudy jewelry. I thought the minor show of cheek helped to flesh out her personality in a positive way, but the judges responded by being shocked that anyone would dare to make fun of the pageant, and put her in the bottom three. Viewers have also seen Stevens thrown off by requests to vamp it up like a model in a photo shoot and her runway walk. If these purely cosmetic elements are not still a big part of what it takes to be Miss America, then Stevens's difficulty with the tasks shouldn't be an issue. But if they are important, then what exactly is the difference between Miss America 2008 and all who have come before her?

I'm still going to pick Stevens as my winner, though. I think in the end, biography will trump her inability to pout like Kate Moss.

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