Beautiful young things; Joan Juliet Buck follows the fate and fortune of models, athletes, and troubled youth in this spring's liveliest shows.

The opening salvo in VH1's new guilty-pleasure reality series The Agency is a staccato hurled at aspiring models who've come to the Wilhelmina agency's open call. "You're too short! You're way too old! You're too big! Your eyes are too close together!" At Wilhelmina, the F word is fat, "sick" is the highest compliment, and most of the dialogue is bleeped expletives. Here, the boys bring in the bucks, but none of the girls are great. On the men's side, Owen's too thin-"He looks like Mary-Kate Olsen"-Tyler changes his hair to go beyond the surfer look, and Adam, "Really sexy, great body, great abs," an eighteen-year-old volleyball player, is flown in from Toronto. Volleyball sounds to the pros at Wilhelmina like knitting or macrame. Men's booker Greg tells the casting agent for the Tommy Hilfiger campaign that Adam plays rugby. "I had to elongate your skills," he tells the boy.

If rugby trumps volleyball, football trumps them all. Friday Night Lights, the NBC adaptation of Peter Berg's 2004 film, uses the same nervous hand-held camera as the movie, but to better effect: You feel you are trespassing on the lives of the high school football team in Dillon, Texas, where God is regularly invoked. And whereas in the movie there were fat people and big losers in Odessa, Texas, in Dillon people are quirky, thoughtful, full of empathy, generally quite thin, and far ...