IIf you’re a millennial woman, America’s Next Top Model may be your first experience with a TV placement. The show, which ran for 10 years from 2003, was an early reality juggernaut and became a household name with supermodel Tyra Banks, its creator and host. At its peak, Top Model attracted over 100 million viewers globally, and left a distinctive but indelible impact on the culture. “Smize”, meaning “smile with your eyes”, is in the Collins Dictionary, while Banks’s infamous speech at an unruly model (“We were all in support of you!”) still circulates as a meme.
With its high-concept photoshoots and extreme makeovers, Top Model was ahead of its time in creating viral moments. However, today the harsh criticisms and body-shaming make for extremely uncomfortable viewing, as Gen Zers have reported binging the show during the pandemic. This latter-day reckoning is central to Netflix’s three-part documentary, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model.
The series boasts remarkable access: Banks, catwalk coach Jay Alexander, creative director Jay Manuel, photographer Nigel Barker and executive producer Ken Mok sit down for interviews with dozens of former contestants. However, it suffers from the usual Netflix issues: it’s too long, unevenly paced, and frantically edited. What could have been a powerful 90-minute film is three hours long, yet the zippy, TikTok-y treatment robs it of its impact.
Banks presents herself as a pioneer committed to democratizing modeling and bringing diversity to fashion, but a reality check reveals that Top Model was intended to perpetuate the toxic status quo. Women were weighed on camera, their bodies criticized. Giselle, an Afro-Latina woman Banks proudly says she struggled with for the casting, was mocked for having a “wide ass.” “That’s how I talk to myself to this day,” she complains decades later. In a safari-themed photoshoot, a woman believed to be large was posed as an elephant.
Today, Top Model’s “challenges” seem like humiliation rituals. One contestant, Dani, was pressured to close a gap in her teeth. Another, Dion, was asked to pose with a bullet wound in his head; Her mother was shot by a former boyfriend and left paralyzed. “I thought it was a coincidence,” she says.
Mok readily admits that the particular shooting was “a mistake”, as a “celebration of violence”, although he appears indifferent to the personal suffering. Meanwhile, Banks shies away from addressing the story and production (“not my area”).
Many contestants came from destitution, and blamed the banks for making them believe that Top Model would cut their ticket. Instead, most found that the show worked against them. Surprise, surprise: The fashion industry hasn’t been impressed by top models’ OTT, increasingly tasteless photoshoots, featuring models as homeless, murder victims or of an ethnicity different from their own.
Although the judges display more remorse than Mok and Banks, everyone involved is quick to agree that the series fell short of 2026 standards. However, what Reality Check makes clear – but fails to emphasize enough – is that many contestants expressed discomfort at the time, and that they were manipulated or pressured into taking part.
The most disturbing part is contestant Shandi’s story about the models’ trip to Milan. After a drunken hot-tub party with some local men she met during a photoshoot, Shandy has sex with one in the shower, then goes to bed with him, with the camera crew following her the entire time. Neither Shandy nor the documentary explicitly refers to this as sexual assault, but original Top Model footage suggests she was too intoxicated to consent. Shandy tearfully revealed in the documentary that she had drank two bottles of wine and “passed out after drinking too much”: “All I knew was that sex was happening, and then I passed out.” And not only did production not interfere, but “it was all filmed”.
Mok’s defense is that Top Model was “filmed as a documentary, and we told the girls that from day one”, adding that the scene was substantially “shortened” in post-production. “For better or worse, that was one of the most memorable moments on Top Model.” Shandy says that her distressed demands to leave the production were rejected, and she was given a phone to call her boyfriend only on the condition that it was filmed and recorded.
The crew later apologized, Shandy says: “They just knew it wasn’t right.” Meanwhile, Banks’ response was to take all the women out to talk to the girls TerrazaThe camera lingers on an anguished Shandi as she holds court about relationship mistakes and “fundamental desires.” This episode aired titled “The Girl Who Cheated”.
It must be said that Banks comes across as a real act, boasting about her ability to spot talent and know what the audience wants. She also blames the audience for Top Model’s extremes: “You guys were demanding it.” When Banks claims to feel grateful for being pushed to reflect and evolve, it comes across as not only a lie, but plainly threatening: The rest of us can be just as gracious when called upon to reflect, “because that day will come”, she says ominously.
Reality Check is right to draw conclusions about the former contestants, all looking happier and healthier than their Top Model days, and candid about the impression the show has made on them. But it also constantly insults the top models by presenting them as products of their times and as criticism coming only from aware Gen Z. For a show about beauty, Top Model was always ugly – but Reality Check’s findings are only superficial.
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