Naomi Campbell Is The Best Thing About ‘The Face Australia’. Also, Birds Fly.

Here’s what we learned about Naomi Campbell after last night’s premiere of The Face Australia: she’s icy, imperious, tough to please, and not one to suffer fools. In other words, not much that’s new.

But who can honestly claim they tuned in looking for much else? Naomi Campbell has always made good TV — whether vamping in George Michael videos, apologising to longtime frenemy Tyra Banks, facing down Oprah Winfrey, or skillfully avoiding questions about blood diamonds. It’s not a stretch to posit that this woman’s antics were a key driver in God’s decision to invent YouTube.

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Australia’s Next Top Model meets The Voice

The Face’s conceit is pretty rote for anyone who’s watched Australia’s Next Top Model (or anything remotely resembling it) in the past decade: a dozen overly emotional young women keen to further their modelling careers compete for a contract as the face (heh) of Olay’s Fresh Effects skin care line.

Unlike the Top Model franchise, which thrives on creator Tyra Banks’ slumber-party ethos, The Face borrows a crucial new element from The Voice. Three coaches/judges — Campbell and Australian models Cheyenne Tozzi and Nicole Trunfio, who seem to have been hand-picked mainly to serve as repositories for Naomi’s shade — are left to fight one another as they assemble their own four-woman teams.

I wish I could say this made the series premiere a gleefully spiteful bitchfest chockablock with jaw-dropping, clutch-your-wine-glass moments. It did not. But first episodes of reality TV shows are always a mixed bag, anyway. They have to juggle a torrent of vital stats — names, ages, weird occupations, strange hobbies, sob stories — with the real reason most of us tuned in: the big celebrity who’s there to goose ratings.

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Naomi vs Nicole

Early in the hour, Naomi warned us that “it’s not going to be no kindergarten school with me”, and she was pretty uppity about her self-appointed place in the fashion firmament: “I have more modelling experience than Cheyenne and Nicole put together — so I will find ‘the face.’”

So far, Tozzi is little more than a cipher. The first warning signal was her pronouncement that “If Nicole and Naomi think I’m a pushover, they’d better think again,” which she wanly declared with a level of heat that can only be described as ‘actually, the burner’s been off the whole time’.

Let’s hope she picks it up. I actually do not remember anything else she said for the entire hour, nor am I certain she was even present for the final-selection round. And that thing went on for at least ten minutes.

Trunfio, however, is another story. “I don’t trust Nicole,” said Naomi, “and I think Nicole is going to play games. But bring the game to Mama.” Do you remember Rose Byrne as Helen Harris III in Bridesmaids? Trunfio seems to be giving us her best impression of that character, and it is delicious. For a full hour, she deflected Campbell’s authoritarian barbs with the right combination of side-eye, snooty grins and passive-aggressive back-talk (yay!). At one point, as the duo tussled over control of a contestant, Nicole argued she would put in the mentoring time that Naomi wouldn’t be willing to offer. That didn’t sit well with Naomi, who threw down her binder, called Nicole a beep-word (I’m guessing it was “bitch”?) and ‘stormed’ off the set.

Nice! Because what kind of impressionable young girl would want to see her mentors, like, cooperating?

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Oh, speaking of the girls!

Right. We’re here for the girls. We’re here to crown a winner. Of course. Um… well, if memory serves correctly, there actually were a few worth keeping an eye on as the series progresses and Naomi grows presumably more cranky.

Brittaney is a self-proclaimed “international model, published author, and… a bit of a psychic”. She also says she received messages from the universe telling her she’ll win, and is very pretty. Your move, universe.

Elusive beauty Sarah looks a bit like Kristen Stewart, and also appears to be one of the more versatile members of the bunch. Nicole was gunning for her to join her quartet of beauties — “I want you, like, really badly” — but Naomi’s hissy fit (see above) swayed/scared her into staying on the queen bee’s hard-to-locate good side.

I’m a big fan of Susan, the stunning and very charismatic South Sudanese modelling novice who was raised in a Ugandan refugee camp. I am not, however, a fan of the series’ overt fetishisation of her external difference, whether in the form of coded compliments (“You have this really cool look about you”; “There’s something… special about Susan”), the tinkly piano score that plays whenever she’s onscreen, or the unnecessary subtitles (!!!) that pop up while she’s speaking.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t express sadness that Noelani did not make last night’s final cut. Our moments together were few, but they hinted at the kind of colossal self-delusion I’ve only experienced a few times in reality TV history — think Jade from Cycle 6 of America’s Next Top Model, or anybody on The Shire. Boasting that photo shoots were her strong suit and claiming she was the keeper of “a bad-ass frown”, Noelani tackled her first challenge — a single shot taken sans makeup, filters or retouching — and biffed it beyond belief.

Vale, you hot mess. Vale.  

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The Face Australia airs on Fox 8 on Tuesdays at 9pm. You can watch last night’s complete first episode here. 

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Nicholas Fonseca is a freelance writer and editor and (sometime) master of film studies student based in Sydney. A former editor at Madison, Fonseca has written for WHO, Sunday Life and Foxtel magazines; prior to his arrival in Sydney, he was based in New York City, where he spent a decade as a staff member with Entertainment Weekly.