The America’s Next Top Model docu-series made me ashamed to have loved the show

The reckoning for America’s Next Top Model came just as it did for much of the cultural phenomena that populated the noughties. 

It was a brutal, toxic gold rush for reality TV, where the humiliation of women was often an easy punchline. ANTM arrived in 2003 to become a pop culture juggernaut of meltdowns and viral moments, all posing as a modelling competition.

Netflix has now given the Tyra Banks-created show the exposé treatment, with Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, a three-parter promising to be ‘the definitive, must-watch chronicle’ of the show and its unique flavour of carnage across 24 so-called cycles.

I don’t quite have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the cycles and their contestants. I started tuning in after the show went co-ed, becoming a proto-Love Island. My abiding memories are of Banks demonstrating her come-hither ‘smize’ and chastising contestants about the dreaded ‘no neck monster’. 

But watching ANTM through the prism of this documentary makes me wonder how I ever enjoyed it at all.

Compiling one morally questionable scene after another tells a dire story, one of body-shaming weigh-ins, eating disorders going unchecked, tear-strewn makeover scenes and challenges ranging from the offensive to the disturbing.

‘We are actually going to switch your ethnicities!’ the stunned models were told on one shoot. Now, the production talking heads are sheepish at the decision, but they then did the same thing a few cycles later.

Elsewhere, models were styled as homeless people, a bulimic woman with fake vomit on her hands and violently killed crime scene victims.

One contestant recalls being told to pose as a woman shot in the head, when her own mother had been left paralysed by a bullet. This, at least, prompts remorse from producer Ken Mok in front of the Netflix cameras.

The docu-series access is notable, with former supermodel Banks in the hot seat, alongside several contestants, as well as show judges Nigel Barker, Miss J Alexander and Jay Manuel.

All three were culled ahead of cycle 19, which Banks said she cried herself to sleep over. None of them appears to have had much to do with her since.

As Banks tells it, her pitch for ANTM came from a boundary-pushing place to create racial and body diversity on screen and in fashion. That ethical underpinning was somehow lost along the way.

Many contestants did not see that ANTM was a reality show before it was a career launchpad. They clearly do now. Winnie Harlow – whose follower count is finger-wagged at us – is one of the handful that went on to genuine success. Most left Banks’ runway and returned to obscurity.

Shandi Sullivan’s story in cycle two is particularly devastating. It is a sequence of events she is still distraught over, but Banks needs to be reminded of the grotesque circumstances. 

Directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan might have pressed Banks and co on certain moments, but if they squirmed, it is not evident here. The show’s host has an excuse for everything: narrow beauty standards, agents in her ear for a certain look, viewer demands and network pressure.

Those arriving with expectations of a mea culpa from Banks will likely be disappointed.

Perhaps fairly, the poorly-aged clips are often excused as a product of the time. But I can’t see how Banks has taken stock of the outpouring of grief and hurt from the models, because she says (with the excitement of someone devoid of the ability to read the room) that the show will be back for cycle 25.

To my count, there is only one unreserved apology, to a contestant who claimed she was inappropriately touched by another model on a shoot. Banks also admits she went ‘too far’ when she infamously shouted at Tiffany Richardson (‘I was rooting for you’, etc, etc). 

Reality Check doesn’t quite feel like the reckoning we were promised. There’s nothing more shocking or revelatory here than the scenes from the show itself, which offer a depressing insight into what we were prepared to inflict on people for the sake of entertainment. 

Many, myself included, might have loved ANTM once upon a time, but now it feels like a relic from a grim era.

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model is available to watch on Netflix now.

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