Sweet Seventeen

Skyler L. Johnson ’08 is going prime time. Last year, MTV and Seventeen magazine set out to “search the country for America’s ultimate role model”—and then somehow found themselves at Harvard. In the process, they also created a reality television show called “Miss Seventeen,” which premiered Monday.

This summer, the show shipped Johnson and 16 other college co-eds—a batch that included southern belles and farm girls, prom queens, and sorority sisters—to a New York City apartment. There, they shared living space while competing for a “Seventeen” cover shoot, an internship, and—oh yeah—a college scholarship.

America’s Next Top Underaged Model? Not quite. Johnson says this show is sex- and scandal-free. “[The show] isn’t focused around drama,” she writes in an e-mail. “It has a much more positive spin than other reality shows.”

But if there won’t be Omorosa-esque girls clawing each other’s eyes out, why tune in at all? Johnson maintains that the show “will have a great impact on young women, in that it will show them that any girl can be a role model and have an impact on society just as the 17 unique girls on the show did.”

“Seventeen” Editor-in-Chief Atoosa Rubenstein explained in a press release that her staff is looking for “a girl who acts like America’s sweetheart whether the cameras are rolling or not.”

Johnson, who lives in Currier House, is pretty sweet. But is she America’s sweetheart? Johnson declined to say, respecting the show’s wishes not to have its entire ending ruined in the pages of FM.