The CW has announced America's Next Top Model's tenth season will premiere on Wednesday, February 20 at 8PM ET/PT.

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Similar to Top Model's Fall 2007 ninth edition, Top Model 10 will premiere with a one-hour episode that will conclude with the judges selecting the tenth season's 13 finalists.  Top Model 10's first finalist will then be booted at the conclusion of the show's February 27 broadcast.

Former supermodel and Dancing with the Stars fourth-season celebrity participant Paulina Porizkova will be replacing Twiggy on Top Model's tenth-season judging panel.  Twiggy had been a regular member of Top Model's judging panel since she replaced Janice Dickinson for the show's Fall 2005 fifth season, and "is leaving due to scheduling conflicts," The CW announced in November.

Porizkova will join Top Model creator Tyra Banks; runway expert J. "Ms. J." Alexander; and photographer Nigel Barker on tenth-season judging panel.

Banks' syndicated daytime talk show The Tyra Banks Show relocated production from Los Angeles to New York last summer, meaning Top Model's tenth season also filmed in New York for the first time since the show's Spring 2005 fourth edition.

While Top Model 9 served as the lead-in for Gossip Girl, Top Model 10 will -- similar to how Top Model 8 served as the Spring 2007 lead-in to encore broadcasts of Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll -- serve as a lead-in for encore Wednesday broadcasts of Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious, which will air new episodes in the Mondays at 9PM ET/PT time slot beginning February 18.

The second season of Pussycat Dolls Present -- which spent its first season searching for a new member of the all-female dance troupe/singing group -- will instead aim to create an entirely new all-female dance troupe/singing group. Gossip Girl will now serve as Pussycat Dolls Present's lead-in on Monday nights.

According to The CW, a desire to prevent Gossip Girl -- which due to the writers strike, will actually be in repeats during midseason -- from having to air against American Idol's Wednesday broadcasts is part of the reason for the show's move to Mondays.

"The Wednesday night competition is tough, and it will get tougher with American Idol moving in," Kelly Kahl, the CBS executive who oversees scheduling for both CBS and The CW, told Daily Variety.

"We're employing a similar strategy to the last time we had Pussycat Dolls on," Kahl told Variety. "We aired an original earlier in the week, then a repeat behind Top Model. The repeats did almost as well as the original. Add the audiences together, and that's a nice little number for the show."

The CW also announced Beauty and the Geek's fifth season will premiere on Tuesday, March 11 at 8PM ET/PT.  Beauty and the Geek -- which had traditionally aired during the Wednesdays at 8PM ET/PT time period when Top Model was on hiatus -- first aired during the Tuesdays at 8PM ET/PT time period as part of The CW's Fall 2007 schedule. 

In addition to Gossip Girl, several other scripted The CW programs -- Everybody Hates Chris, Aliens in America, Girlfriends,  The Game, and Reaper -- will move to new time periods for the network's new midseason schedule.

"We are really trying to take advantage of admittedly a very changed schedule now because of the [ongoing writers] strike," Kahl told The Hollywood Reporter.  "With the strike, we have an interesting opportunity to experiment, and with the nice stability from our reality shows, we can get a look at how some of these [scripted] shows do in other time periods."

Farmer Wants a Wife, a new Outback Jack-like reality dating series that The CW had originally planned to air as midseason programming, will now likely to debut in May, according to Kahl.
About The Author: Christopher Rocchio

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