Photo: Michael Desmond /CW Network/Courtesy Everett Collection
If you ask Tyra Banks, America’s Next Top Model was meant to disrupt the fashion industry. But if you remember tuning in to watch the models being ordered to “smize” while runway-walking off the side of a skyscraper, or cosplaying as “high-fashion” homeless people alongside actual homeless people, you know that the show morphed into an extreme spectacle that, for 24 seasons, summed up the worst excesses of 2000s reality TV. I sometimes wonder if the former contestants still jolt upright in the middle of the night screaming, “Tyra Mail!” as they wake from a nightmare.
Few shows embody the phrase “It was a different time” more than ANTM. It premiered in 2003, when reality TV was on the cusp of a vibe shift. The following year, the fast-developing genre moved away from so-called “social experiments” like The Real World and toward high-drama concepts like The Biggest Loser and The Swan. Other 2004 shows include To Catch a Predator and I Want a Famous Face, where people got plastic surgery to look like their favorite celebrities. (Oh, and The Apprentice, which of course had no long-term consequences.)
How did Top Model — a series that Banks created with a goal to challenge the overwhelmingly white, size-zero-obsessed fashion industry — become a race to the bottom?
The answer, which is unpacked in Netflix’s new docuseries, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, feels both predictable and unsatisfying. Over three parts, we’re reintroduced to Banks, the supermodel whom ANTM turned into a cultural icon and a mogul. She’s joined by the show’s former stars, including judges Jay Manuel and J Alexander; the “noted” fashion daddy photographer Nigel Barker; executive producer and co-creator Ken Mok; and a string of the most memorable contestants. Their re-telling of this story is just as dark and addictive as ANTM itself. Dawn Ostroff, the former UPN network boss who green-lit the show, says she never worried about airing its most outrageous scenes, because “good television is good television.” Yet the reason Netflix’s postmortem exists is because our idea of where “the line” is has changed. During the pandemic, we saw a retroactive reckoning for ANTM (and Banks herself) when binge-watchers of the show were horrified by what they saw. “It brought so much joy to so many people, but also so much anger,” Banks recites in a soft TV-ready tone. “It went from this thing that everybody loved to, overnight, a whole different lens.”
The early years of ANTM are a case study in how 2000s reality TV became an ethical disaster. When it was convenient, producers hid behind the rules of documentary-making, where the general approach is “film everything, never interfere.” On the second “cycle” — real fans know it’s never called a “season” — 21-year-old Shandi Sullivan has the classic Cinderella story. She is a shy, nerdy Walgreens clerk who is transformed into a high-fashion siren. But her narrative arc turns when, toward the end of the competition, a group of Italian male models shows up to party with the contestants. Sullivan becomes intoxicated and ends up in bed with one of the models, drifting in and out of consciousness, seemingly too drunk to consent to anything. (She estimates that she drank two bottles of wine by herself.) Not only is footage of the encounter filmed and broadcast on the show, cameras also capture Sullivan tearfully confessing her infidelity to her boyfriend and later phoning the model to ask if he used protection.
At other times, producers were more than happy to ditch the documentary shtick and step in to manufacture drama. In cycle eight, the theme of week four’s photo shoot is — wait for it — “crime scene victims.” And if that weren’t bad enough, we also learn that the mother of one contestant, Dionne Walters, was paralyzed when she was shot by a jealous ex-boyfriend. On the shoot, producers assign Walters the role of a “gun violence victim,” resting her corpse-like body against a wall with blood splattered behind her. (In the docuseries, Mok takes full responsibility for the shoot, admitting it “glorified violence.”)
Perhaps the biggest betrayal of ANTM is how far it strayed from its founding premise. After being on the receiving end of the industry’s prejudices herself, Banks says she created the show to showcase different types of beauty. She pushed for a diverse cast of models and, in a time where it was pretty rare to see queer people on TV, Miss J and Mr. Jay were front and center. But in the docuseries, we see many flashbacks of Janice Dickinson — the “world’s first supermodel” and a judge on the first five cycles — as the voice of an industry where everyone above a size two was considered “plus size.” She calls the models fat and old or tells them, “You look like you have a penis!”
While Banks is seen vocally challenging Dickinson, she also upholds some of these attitudes. In the first cycle, she tells Ebony Haith that the judges have complained that her Black skin looks “ashy.” Three cycles later, we meet another contestant, Keenyah Hill, who is constantly fat-shamed. On a “seven deadly sins”-themed photo shoot, they give Hill “gluttony” before assigning her the elephant on a safari-themed shoot. Cameras zoom in on her (slender but apparently bloated) stomach, and the editors make it look like she is constantly snacking. At a judging panel, Banks advises her to “get a burger and take the bread off.” And even more shockingly, when Hill later becomes uncomfortable on a photo shoot where a male model keeps touching her and leering at her, she is the one who is criticized for calling it out. Barker apparently doesn’t understand the problem, insisting in the docuseries that it’s up to the models to “get the job done” in these instances.
This gets to the heart of the issue: Banks wants credit for inventing a show to “fight against” the fashion industry, but what she was actually doing was teaching the girls how to thrive within an oppressive system, like she did. That’s a different thing altogether.
There is a frustrating lack of contrition from most of the interviewees in the Netflix series. While Jay Manuel says he “really struggled” when the creative on the show “started to shift” in a more extreme direction, his juiciest sound bites are about his public feud with Banks, who he says iced him out on set and gradually stripped him of creative control. Banks describes how she masterminded ANTM and became an “expert editor” and producer, but she rarely wants to fully own the show’s failures. She does apologize to Hill but also obfuscates by saying that was what the industry was like at the time. And she does the same when discussing Dani Evans — the cycle-six winner who was pressured to get a gap in her teeth closed or face elimination. One of the only times we hear Banks apologizing unreservedly is to Tiffany Richardson — a cycle-four hopeful whom she screamed at, creating one of the show’s most famous scenes. After becoming frustrated at Richardson’s lack of tears when she was eliminated, a red-haired Banks unleashes fire on her, shouting, “I HAVE NEVER IN MY LIFE YELLED AT A GIRL LIKE THIS!” (And according to judge Nolé Marin, there was a lot more that didn’t make the cut.)
At other points, Banks attempts to pass the blame to the viewers. “You guys were demanding it,” she says. “The audience wanted more and more.” (She compares the show to Fear Factor without realizing that neatly encapsulates the problem.) There is a grain of truth to this, because the Top Model formula was phenomenally successful: ANTM aired in over 120 countries and spawned over 40 international iterations. And I’d be lying if I said that, as a teen, I didn’t tune in with the vaguely sadistic hope of watching Banks forcibly shave someone’s head or making the models walk in ten-inch heels on a rickety bridge over shark-infested waters. But blaming the audience feels like a flimsy excuse, especially when Banks admits that some of the show’s most controversial moments — including a “race swap” photo shoot where some contestants essentially wore blackface — were her own idea. (They did this twice, FYI, and the second time featured a Native American headdress.)
In this context, some other questionable moments feel more forgivable, like when the models had to do photo shoots with rotting fish carcasses or the most ridiculous runway challenges involving swinging pendulums, spinning carousels, and a moving conveyor belt. It’s not productive to project today’s morals onto silly scenes like these, because there’s a clear difference between Squid Game-ing a catwalk and the show’s deeper ethical failures, like the stories of Sullivan and Walters. Ken Mok admits that the production team knew many of the young women were vulnerable. So shouldn’t they have known better at the time? Instead, they got rich off exacerbating their trauma.
If ANTM began with good intentions, then this docuseries demonstrates how quickly a show — and its creators — can be corrupted by success. Not that Banks sees it this way, even now. To her, if it’s not the audience, then it’s production, her network bosses, or the fashion industry who are at fault. Her many rebuttals play alongside flashbacks of her becoming a louder, meaner, caricatureish version of herself. There’s something distinctly Trumpian about reality TV accelerating her slide into megalomania, which ends with her firing Manuel, Alexander, and Barker before eventually being let go herself. She fed the ratings beast — then it came for her.
Sitting in Netflix’s confessional chair, Banks seems like a totally different person. The version of her who yelled, “Learn something from this!” is a million miles from the eerily calm, glazed figure we see here, whose testimony feels vaguely hostage-like. Only at the very end does the “Be quiet, Tiffany!” Tyra briefly return. In a Top Model-style soliloquy, she thanks fans for calling her out before turning the tables yet again: “I want you guys to be just as open as I am now, about getting called out on my shit, for when somebody calls you out on yours.” I’m not sure she’s really learned something from this at all.
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