There She Goes...

Even a stage full of string-bikinied, super-achieving Miss America wannabes apparently can’t hold a twirling baton to 12 obese people battling for the title of biggest loser.

Last week, ABC gave Miss America the hook, announcing it would drop the annual telecast and leaving the venerable beauty pageant without a TV outlet for the first time in 50 years. The network’s announcement came just a day after NBC debuted “The Biggest Loser,” which follows an XXXL crew through months of dieting, workouts and the usual reality-show humiliations and privations. The dieter who drops the most pounds, while sweating, weeping and trash-talking along the way, will win the $250,000 prize.

Maybe the only thing these changes signal is that America’s morbid obsession with food -- what to eat, what not to eat, how much to eat -- has replaced our old obsession with the perfect bod. Certainly, the Miss America pageant tried harder than ever last month to tart up what once was a Norman Rockwell tableau of young American womanhood. The contestants’ poolside vamps and cleavage close-ups all but squeezed out the tap-dance routines and off-key arias of old. To no avail; Miss America’s ratings continued their long slide, down to a record-low 9.8 million viewers this year from 85 million in 1960.

“The Biggest Loser” was hardly a ratings smash either; its first-night numbers were only a smidge better than “Miss America.” But combine “Loser” with the growing horde of reality shows, along with Dr. Phil, Oprah and the prime-time “news magazine” confessionals, and the sum of all this wretched pathos may say more than its parts -- something about who we are these days.

Out with goody-two-shoes ingenues who studied hard, drank their milk and just said no. Forget those who danced a straight-and-narrow path to success. Americans seem to want abject failure and degradation, followed by sniveling recovery and redemption: the cheating wife now desperate to get her husband back; the abusive alcoholic dad slipping and sliding toward sobriety; the imperious executive whose bout with cancer has him smelling roses and feeding the homeless.

We’ve become fascinated with the mosaic of human misery and the arc of failure and redemption. Sure, we ridicule the poor slob who can’t pass up a Krispy Kreme, but by the time the credits roll, we’re rooting for him.

Forget well-adjusted overachievers. Give us wretched failures, crying tears of shame but still clawing toward the light. “Recovery” is America’s new script.