A cable channel’s efforts to update the Miss America pageant by coupling it with a contestant-profiling reality show has ended amid suggestions that the face-lift was threatening to transform the pageant into a “mean” event.

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Sam Haskell, chairman of the Miss America Organization’s board of directors, will sign copies of “Promises I Made My Mother” from 7 until 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday before the Miss Mississippi pageant events at the Vicksburg Convention Center. Haskell will speak at the pageant’s Thursday preliminary competition. Pageant tickets are required for entry. Signings are slated also from 10 until 11:30 a.m. Friday at Cinnamon Tree, 1322 Washington St., during a pageant contestant autograph party, and at 2 Saturday afternoon at Lorelei Books, 1103 Washington St. Haskell’s book sells for $24 and may be purchased at each signing location. Proceeds will go to the Miss Mississippi Corporation, Haskell said.

Set to televise its third pageant in January, the channel, TLC, has no plans to repeat a four-night series that tracked state pageant winners as they lived together in the weeks preceding the previous two national competitions, according to officials at the channel and the Miss America Organization.

The series is the victim of a time crunch, said Dustin Smith, a TLC spokesman. “We found it very difficult to tell each woman’s story in the short period we have between the conclusion of the state pageants and the national pageant,” Smith said. “We tried some different ways over the last two years, but we weren’t able to find a satisfactory one.”

But in an interview, Sam Haskell, chairman of the Miss America Organization’s board of directors, said TLC “thought that we had made (the reality show) too nice. They wanted to make it meaner” by focusing on rivalries between the contestants, he said. “And we couldn’t have anything to do with something that was going to be mean.”

And so, as Haskell prepares to participate in Miss Mississippi Pageant festivities and sign copies of his recently released memoir in Vicksburg, the organization he helps steer has lost what he presents in the book as a marketing tool important to restoring its appeal to younger viewers.

The episode illustrates some of the challenges confronting Haskell’s attempt to “rebuild the Miss America brand,” a bid that began when the Amory native and former Hollywood agent was elected board chairman in 2006 after a lifetime of involvement with the pageant.

Haskell began singing backup in the Miss Mississippi pageant chorus in the 1970s, and he met his wife, former Miss Mississippi Mary Donnelly Haskell, while she was a participant in and he was the student director of the Miss University pageant at Ole Miss.

Afterward, as an agent at Hollywood’s William Morris Agency for nearly 25 years, he arranged television appearances for reigning Miss Americas, helped find hosts and judges for the event and served as a judge himself for two national pageants and several state competitions. 

By the time Haskell was elected chairman of the Miss America Organization’s board in 2006, however, the pageant had been dropped by network television due to low ratings and was beset with financial difficulties.

According to Haskell, the organization’s balance sheet has undergone a makeover on his watch, thanks in part to staff cuts and a fundraising partnership arranged with the Children’s Miracle Network. “We’re in the black for the first time in 13 years,” he said.

Efforts to update the pageant’s image are ongoing.

The organization bills itself as the world’s largest source of scholarship money for women, doling out awards to contestants through its national competition as well as preliminaries such as the state pageant set to kick off at the Vicksburg Convention Center on Wednesday. 

To vie for the awards, the contestants appear before judges in swimsuits and evening gowns, undergo interviews designed to elicit information about their backgrounds and views on current issues and seek to display artistic abilities in a talent competition.

Haskell and other Miss America backers highlight the event’s talent component as one of the fundamental distinctions between it and the Donald Trump-owned Miss USA pageant, which features only swimsuit, evening gown and interview contests.

“I hate it when people get us confused with Miss USA,” Haskell said. “No girl in America says, ‘I want to grow up to be Miss USA.’ They want to grow up to be Miss America.”

But, while NBC has aired the Miss USA competition since 2002, the Miss America finals have been passed around three television homes over the last five years.

ABC stopped televising the pageant in 2004 after it attracted its smallest television audience ever, and CMT in 2007 backed out early on a deal to televise it through 2011. The pageant had attracted the largest viewership in history for a show on CMT, known primarily for its country-music programming, but the audience was about a third of the size of ABC’s least numerous, according to ratings information supplied by The Nielsen Company.

Haskell and the Miss America board subsequently embraced a three-year deal with TLC, which is affiliated with the Discovery Channel and features a bevy of home-improvement and reality shows.

Ratings for the pageant have increased during its run on TLC, Nielsen’s ratings show, but the partnership has also given rise to tension including the dispute over the reality series.

Haskell was an early supporter of the idea.

“I was willing to gamble losing some of the pageant’s older audience to get a younger set of viewers,” Haskell writes in “Promises I Made My Mother.” The book portrays Haskell as struggling to win acceptance for the show within the pageant organization against vociferous opposition from “traditionalists.”

“I told the state directors, ‘If this reality series brings young people to the pageant, then we need to do it. If we want to survive, we have to attract a younger audience,’” he wrote, adding that the series’ 2008 run “introduced the (pageant contestants) to America and revealed that they were real women, not just perfect bodies in swimsuits and evening gowns,” he adds.

After staging the series again before the 2009 pageant, though, the Miss America Organization and TLC encountered creative differences that have apparently spelled the program’s demise.

With the reality series now extinct, TLC and the Miss America Organization are working on alternative ways to present pageant contestants to television viewers in advance of the finals.

Haskell said those plans may include a TLC special to air the night before the pageant finals. But “nothing has been finalized yet,” according to Smith, the TLC spokesman.

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Contact Ben Bryant at bbryant@vicksburgpost.com