The road to Miss America will go through Hollywood this year. Whether it leads to Las Vegas again remains to be seen.
The pageant will tape a seven-episode documentary series titled “Finding Miss America” in Los Angeles from Sept. 5 to 13, the Miss America Organization announced Monday.
The series, which is to air on Country Music Television for a week preceding the televised pageant finals in January (exact date still to be determined), will show the 52 women in preliminary competition and give viewers a chance to choose which ones advance to the top 15.
But pageant officials still aren’t saying where or when the next crowning will be held. Pageant CEO Art McMaster is awaiting a final proposal from Las Vegas, which hosted the last one. He wouldn’t identify the other potential cities.
“There are a couple of other cities that are aggressively coming after us right now,” he said.
Jettisoned by ABC after record-low ratings for the 2004 pageant, Miss America broke with 85 years of tradition last year in moving out of Atlantic City, where it was founded in 1921 as a bathing-beauty revue.
Picked up by the Nashville, Tenn.-based cable outlet, the Jan. 21 crowning of Miss Oklahoma Jennifer Berry drew 3.1 million viewers – huge numbers for CMT, which never drew more than 2.9 million for a program before Miss America.
