If anyone expects an apology from Tyra Banks in Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model, they will surely be disappointed. The new Netflix docuseries chronicles the evolution of America’s Next Top Model—and the toxic messaging about beauty it pushed upon audiences—featuring interviews from some of its judges and contestants, executive producer Ken Mok, and host-slash-creator Tyra Banks. To a millennial viewer such as myself, watching it felt like a sort of seance—a call into the void, making contact with the meltdown voyeurism, diet culture, and reality TV ghosts of the early aughts.
The reality competition series ran for 24 seasons (or “cycles,” as they’re called) between 2003 and 2018. Contestants vied for the title, a cash prize, and a loosely defined modeling contract. Each week, they endured challenges—mostly themed photo shoots—that have since been lampooned across social media for their cultural insensitivity, all-around weirdness, and lack of relevance to modeling. (Cycle four contestant Keenyah Hill shared in the docuseries that she couldn’t use her photos from the show in her modeling portfolio because they were so thematically nuts.)
Every cycle, beauty makeovers were the highlight—and the biggest point of cognitive dissonance. Banks says in the docuseries, as she has many times in the past, that she made a point of casting models whom the fashion industry writ large excluded at the time—Black models, brown models, queer models, curvier models… only to bind them in the same impossible beauty standards she claimed to denounce. Weaves, extensions, and drastic haircuts or color changes were ostensibly forced upon contestants for the sake of making them more fashion-forward. Cycle six’s Joanie Dodds and Danielle Evans were vaguely threatened with elimination unless they agreed to permanent, painful dental work. (Dodds was asked to straighten her smile, which required surgically removing several teeth and replacing them with implants; Evans was asked to have the gap between her two front teeth surgically closed because it wasn’t “marketable,” which she vocally opposed on camera.)
Criticisms about contestants’ looks from Banks and her judges ran the gamut in their cruelty. And when receiving feedback on their performance in challenges from week to week, panel critiques frequently strayed from modeling prowess to aesthetics. Contestants were measured and weighed on camera at times and were often interrogated about their eating habits in front of the entire cast and crew. In cycle one, Banks openly criticized 18-year-old contestant Giselle Samson for having a “wide ass.” In the docuseries, cycle 18 contestant Ebonee Davis described the joy she felt being a Black woman on a television show created by a Black woman—and how that joy deflated when Banks told her the judges thought she looked “ashy.”
Naturally, these instances didn’t age well and have long drawn post-mortem criticisms. Reality Check makes a point to mention ad nauseam that much of the public backlash toward America’s Next Top Model took hold following the pandemic, when a majority of people were blowing through their to-watch queue, desperately seeking fresh viewing fodder. A “2020 lens” is how members of the cast described this perceived shift in public reaction in the docuseries. The general sentiment is that things were “different” when the show originally aired—back when reality TV was built on a foundation of shock, awe, and scrutinizing women’s bodies. (Anyone else remember The Swan and Extreme Makeover? Yikes!) There is a kernel of truth there, but it does not absolve Banks, Mok, or anyone else involved in the show’s production of their behavior.
I watched America’s Next Top Model in that fabled “different” time, when I was a tween-going-on-teen. I remember judges calling contestants around a size six “plus-size” and criticizing them for being too big. I remember contestants who were a size four being told to lose weight—the how didn’t matter. In Reality Check, Whitney Thompson (cycle 10) and Bre Scullark (cycle five) recalled the proliferation of eating disorders on set, where some contestants skipped meals ahead of photoshoots and challenges. The docuseries also featured a brief archival clip of Banks and judge Jay Manuel discussing an unnamed contestant he said “isn’t plus-size and isn’t model-size;” Banks responded that the model should gain weight to become “plus size.”
@thespillpod The Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model documentary has officially landed on Netflix, and it’s serving up a brutal, unfiltered look at the high-fashion carnage that defined a generation of reality TV. On today’s episode of The Spill we’re we’re unpacking the most shocking revelations from the doc, from the trauma-inducing makeovers to those infamous “we were all rooting for you” moments. Tap the link in our bio to listen to the latest episode of The Spill, or find us wherever you get your favourite podcasts. #tyrabanks #americasnexttopmodel #ANTM #netflix #documentary ♬ original sound - The Spill Podcast
Meanwhile, Thompson, the show’s first “plus-size” winner (she was a size six at the time), said that when she signed to Elite Model Management after the series, a contingency of her victory, the agency didn’t even have a plus division. The way models’ weight was treated on ANTM communicated to my younger self: Be skinny or be fat; pick a side—but if you fall into “fat” territory, beware the consequences.
I have struggled with disordered eating my entire life. Being 13 years old and obsessed with America’s Next Top Model in tandem with the ever-pervasive diet and tabloid culture of the 2000s absolutely contributed to my shaky body image. With a frontal lobe about as firm as overnight oats, I, like many others my age, fell victim to the ideals presented in the docuseries: It’s just how things are. My friends and I entered middle school and traded juice boxes and multiplication tables for diet soda and calorie counting. We didn’t understand at the time how the media we consumed, not our diets, was causing our anguish.
@nosybystanders This #antm doc on #netflix is really eye opening because what do you mean #tyrabanks never visited #missjalexander ♬ original sound - Nosybystanders
But in Reality Check, Banks—who has been interviewed about the negative impact of her show multiple times—smizes unflinchingly into the camera lens as she utters every adage and platitude instead of, "Hey, I'm sorry for fucking up a generation of young people—particularly young women." (For what it’s worth, Banks has said in past interviews that she “agreed” with criticisms for “off choices,” but it was still predicated by the “it was a different time” spiel.)
But the sins against contestants—and society writ large, for that matter—extend beyond distorted conversations about beauty. The highlight reel of what-the-absolute-hell moments on America’s Next Top Model also included the now-infamous race-swap photo shoot, a photo shoot where the models pose as unhoused people, and a spine-chilling photo shoot where the models (one of whom was the daughter of a gun violence survivor) pose as murder victims. The models Banks vied to empower so audaciously became her dolls for makeovers and playing pretend. It stripped contestants of their bodily autonomy—if they could not protest a bob, they did not have a leg to stand on when the series took unpredictably dark turns.
@literallylaurad HEARTBREAKING and criminal discussion on this series!!!! America’s Next Top Model cycle 2 contestant Shandi speaks on the new Reality Check docuseries on Netflix about the incident framed as her cheating storyline #antm #americasnexttopmodel #tyrabanks #2000s #realitytv ♬ original sound - Laura
As many fans vividly remember, the production filmed and aired cycle two contestant Shandi Sullivan’s intoxicated encounter with a man in Milan, which she describes in the docuseries as sexual assault. “It’s a little hard for me to talk about production because that’s not my territory,” Banks said when asked why production did not intervene to protect a clearly intoxicated Sullivan, blaming Mok and other members of the team. (Writer's note: Banks also held an executive producer title on the show; the docuseries does not interrogate exactly how production wouldn’t have been her “territory” in this instance.)
In one instance, she does apologize—on camera, not face-to-face—to cycle four contestant Keenyah Hill, who faced unwanted sexual advances from a male model on the set of a photo shoot. These instances happened on camera and in front of the entire production crew, but when Hill stopped the shoot to share her distress, she was dismissed and later told she needed to take more control. Banks’s response in hindsight: “None of us knew… but she needed more [protection],” Banks said of Hill’s experience. “Boo-boo, I am so sorry.”
@nosybystanders The #models are coming out of the woodwork for the #netflix doc about #antm and yes it’s all sad and disappointing #tyrabanks #realitytv ♬ original sound - Nosybystanders
And that’s ultimately how Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model unfolded. Banks acted as though she parted the Red Sea to make her vanity project come to fruition—all to change the modeling industry by way of reality television—and mostly refused to acknowledge the gravity of her choices. But Banks believes what she believes: that her work was groundbreaking. ”24 cycles of changing the world,” she said last year while accepting an award from Essence.
Watching Reality Check, I could only surmise that Banks wasn’t just drinking her own Kool-Aid; she had manufactured an ayahuasca-like substance from contestants’ distress that transported her from this reality we’re all living in. She used words like “accountability” as a shield, and her loose apologies felt hollow and flippant to me as a result.
@mokoab Hunny I was sat.. #antm #netflix #documentary ♬ original sound - Mona Kosar Abdi
But who is to blame for America's Next Top Model going off the rails? The networks, Banks, or executive producers? For viewers, it's hard to navigate the finger-pointing. The buck is passed around as liberally as hair wefts in the show’s makeover episodes. From judges to Banks. From Banks to Ken Mok. From Mok to network executives. For God’s sake, Banks blames the viewers at one point, saying, “You guys were demanding it. And so we kept pushing… more, and more, and more.”
In the many dropped bombs in this docuseries, one explosion still rings in my ears: Banks’s out-of-nowhere revelation that cycle 25 is coming. For all the discussion around accountability and how America’s Next Top Model was a sign of the times, I’m not confident Banks and her peers can be trusted with a reboot, especially now with diet culture and body shaming resurgent and cosmetic procedures of every sort multiplying; beauty standards remain as rigid as ever.
At one point in the docuseries, Banks says, “Hindsight is 20/20 for all of us. It just so happens that a lot of the things that are 20/20 for me happened in front of the world.” If you ask me, it’s time she gets glasses.
Originally published on Allure.
