Chrissy Teigen is an exceptional model. She's beautiful, memorable, and has a persona that somehow manages to capture alluring sensuality and girl-next-door innocence simultaneously. Because of the popularity and appeal that's followed since the 2010 Sports Illustrated shoot that turned her into a star, people have been giving Chrissy Teigen jobs on television. Unfortunately, she has come across poorly in almost all of them.
The pinnacle of this was the Billboard Music Awards in 2015. Teigen hosted the show alongside Ludacris and spent the entire evening making gratuitous references to her husband, John Legend, in a self-conscious manner that suggested she had no personality outside of being attached to his. The evening started with her introducing herself in a way that denigrated her own achievements, with the phrase: “I bang a musician.” As the show moved along, things did not improve.
The following year, Teigen joined Spike TV’s Lip Sync Battle as a “color commentator.” In actuality, she stayed almost entirely silent for the first season of the show, trapped in a DJ booth that she clearly wasn’t operating. Mostly she stood around, waved her arms in the air, laughed like she may or may not pee her pants, and mimed along in a manner that, frankly, distracted from the main event. Though Chrissy Teigen’s role on the show has since improved, at the start, she was left to her own devices and was, quite clearly, lost. Social media wondered aloud and repeatedly what she was even doing there.
Based on Teigen’s TV roles so far, it’s been easy to assume that she’s a person that desperately wants to be wacky and fun and self-deprecating, but doesn’t actually have the personality to pull it off. For a little while there, the woman we all desperately wanted to be more than a pretty face seemed very much like she might actually just be a pretty face.