If you were around during the height of the popularity of America’s Next Top Model, then you know it was inescapable, no matter which corner of the planet you occupied. Even before the Top Model format’s expansion to some 120 international versions and over 200 seasons, for some bizarre reason called cycles, ANTM was a global phenomenon, with supermodel Tyra Banks as its reigning queen.
A collaboration between Ken Mok, creator of Making the Band, and Tyra Banks, ANTM was initially a project designed to foster inclusion in the modeling and fashion industries. According to the new Netflix docu-series, Reality Check: Inside ANTM, Banks had wanted to find a way to break through the discriminatory world of fashion, which she had experienced firsthand as she climbed the ladder to stardom.
The show’s format followed its unscripted reality competition predecessors, like American Idol: Each week, the coaches would give contestants a challenge, and the judges would eliminate a fashion hopeful until one remained: the one true Top Model. For this, Banks recruited her industry friends, J. Alexander, affectionately known as Miss J, as runway coach, and his counterpart, Mr. Jay, Jay Manuel, as Creative Director. Later down the line, adding Nigel Barker as the show’s resident straight, white-ish, hunk and photographer.
With this cast, Mok and Banks took the show to every major network at the time, and each one turned it down for the same reason: models were just not very sympathetic characters. Finally, they were able to sell the show, for close to no budget, to the now-defunct UPN, which has since merged with the WB to create the CW, which had at the time been owned by Viacom and later became part of the CBS Corporation (you’re welcome for the network history lesson).
Tyra Banks then set out to cast a diverse group of women to compete in the first cycle, making sure to include Black, White, and Hispanic girls, much to the dismay of former Viacom co-president Les Moonves.
This, it appears, is where the goodwill of the producers stopped. It seems that every story out of the ANTM universe since the beginning of production on cycle one has been a horror story of the very acute kind. They ranged from the unfortunately lesser offense of treating whiteness as the beauty default to unapologetically airing sexual assault on a drunken contestant, and everything in between, including giving some models dental surgery, threatening elimination if they refused — all while seemingly starving the participants, many of whom developed eating disorders and regularly fainted on camera.
In Reality Check: Inside ANTM, Tyra Banks attempts to frame the abuses as “dumb mistakes,” easily recognizable in hindsight, but which at the time seemed fine. At one point, even saying, “If it doesn’t bleed and lead, it doesn’t work,” referring to the old media adage, which means that stories without tragedy do not captivate an audience. Banks makes no effort to apologize for her abysmal treatment of some of the contestants, which has left the audience wondering if she was at least sorry for the body shaming she inflicted on the women, and of which she herself had long been a victim. Her depiction of the abuses as growing pains, setting the stage for today’s empowerment of influencers, is both appalling and a ridiculous correlation.
Perhaps most scathing to Banks’ reputation is her handling of the creative break-up between her and her three colleagues, the J’s and Nigel Barker.
After cycle 8, Mr. Jay, who had begun to disagree with the show’s creative practices, like painting the models to “switch” their ethnicities for one challenge, and creating storylines to fit the reasoning for eliminating a contestant, decided he would quit the show. He reached out to Tyra Banks, who had been one of his closest friends and collaborators, only for her to completely cut him off after responding with three words: “I am disappointed,” and allowing production to harass and covertly threaten to blacklist him.
However, when the network finally decided to dismiss the three veterans after cycle 18, Tyra Banks appears to have had no such reactions of rage and disappointment because, as she says, “there are no sacred cows,” not even her. Even more disconcerting is Banks’s lack of contact with Miss J after his stroke, which left him paralyzed and, for a period of time, unable to speak. But all is not lost. As you watch the documentary, you see the love the J’s and Barker still hold for each other, even as Banks refuses to discuss her strained relationship with Mr. Jay.
What becomes very clear in this doc-series is the complete lack of reason for ANTM to ever have existed. It accomplished none of its goals: it treated inclusion like a joke, made light of hideous industry practices, gave the models unrealistic challenges that left them with highly themed photographs entirely unusable for their portfolios, and created a world where the models left the show with close to no modeling prospects.
The challenges, often pushing the contestants to their physical limits, were frequently designed to entertain a television audience (even with their less-than-palatable themes like the unhoused people challenge or the victims of violence challenge) rather than to help build a model’s materials for the real world. This isn’t how the industry functions. But there’s a reason for the show’s break with reality: people forget that most of the producers and cast, with the exception (at the time) of Banks, had worked longer in reality television than in the fashion industry.
As former contestant Dani Evans describes her time post-ANTM, the careers of the models were negatively impacted by the fact that they had become reality show participants. No self-respecting high-fashion brand would appreciate the distraction from its garments, and therefore, the agents would hold these models back for fear of destroying their own reputations.
In the 24 cycles of the show, there have been over 300 total contestants, 24 winners, and only 3 high-fashion models who have seen any real-world success: Leila Goldkuhl from C19, Winnie Harlow from C21, and Fatima Siad from C10.
Only one has become a household name: Winnie Harlow.
As the docu-series ends with the announcement of cycle 25, and while there’s hardly any doubt that Tyra Banks’s initial intentions were good, we’re still asking the question: Does anybody need this show?
