“You wanna be on top?” echoed the theme tune to America's Next Top Model, the reality TV show that taught a generation of women how to smize (AKA smile with your eyes) and traumatised approximately 311 contestants over 24 seasons – sorry, we mean cycles.
Helmed by Tyra Banks, ANTM was peak problematic noughties TV, filmed and aired during a time when little thought was given to participants' safety and mental health. Banks and her panel of judges promised to give their hopeful models a leg up in the fashion industry. Instead, most of them walked away from the show with bad makeovers and an unusable portfolio of photoshoots that range from the ridiculous (think: a lingerie shoot in a giant bowl of Greek salad) to the genuinely offensive (more on that later). Not exactly a fast-track ticket to Paris Fashion Week.
But the false promises were just the tip of the iceberg. As we discovered when lockdown boredom drove us to rewatch the show in 2020, ANTM’s biggest crimes were less a matter of taste and more the result of pervasive toxic culture on set, one fuelled by shameless body-shaming and trauma-mining tactics designed to stoke drama.
This is what Netflix’s new docuseries Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model attempts to unpack over three hour-long episodes, revealing the stories behind the show’s most outrageous moments through interviews with its creators and contestants. From Tyra’s “We were all rooting for you!” tirade to accusations of bullying and sexual harassment, here are the most shocking revelations.
It’s not a huge surprise that ANTM was a hotbed for body-shaming – this was a noughties reality show about the fashion industry, after all. But given Banks's insistence that she was motivated by a desire to make the industry more inclusive, there are some major discrepancies between her words and her actions.
Take Cycle four contestant Keenya Hill, for example, whose weight became her defining narrative on the show. To viewers at home, she already looked the part. To Banks and the ANTM producers, her body was fair game for unwarranted comments and subtle digs. On two separate occasions, Hill’s assigned themes on photoshoots seemed designed to send a pointed message: for a “Seven Deadly Sins” shoot, she was told to embody “gluttony”, while on an animal-themed shoot, she was dressed as an elephant.
“To see that that was going to be my entire narrative, it just felt unfair and just felt kind of dirty,” says Hill in the documentary, remembering how the show was edited to make it seem like she was eating more food than the other models. Eventually, Banks even brought up her weight during the judging panel, before offering some unsolicited advice. “This photo is really beautiful, but I hate to say it, they had to do a lot of body work in retouching,” Banks said. “I think it’s all about choices, Keenyah. You can get a burger and take the bread off.”
The most distressing incident came in cycle two, while the contestants were on a trip to Milan. After their photoshoot, they invited some local men back to their flat for a hot tub party, where they got increasingly drunk throughout the night. Shandi, who was 21 at the time, says in the documentary that she’d had two bottles of wine by herself and blacked out. “I just knew sex was happening, and then I passed out,” she says in the documentary. “I think after getting out of the hot tub [...] they should have been like ‘Alright, this has gone too far. We’ve got to pull her out of this.’”
When asked about how production handled the incident, Tyra Banks said, “I do remember her story. It's a little difficult for me to talk about production because that's not my territory,” while executive producer Ken Mok said, "We treated Top Model as a documentary. And we told the girls that," Mok said. “We would go over the rules. There's going to be cameras with you 24/7, day in and day out, and they're going to cover everything — the good, the bad, and everything in between. No matter what happens while you're on camera, we're going to document all of that.”
In cycle four, Keenyah Hill referred to an incident during a photoshoot with male models. “They had these teeny, tiny pieces of loincloth covering their members, and [one model] was like, touching me, grabbing me,” she explains. “I really felt that he was just taking advantage of the moment to touch me.” She continues, “To be on a TV set and still not be protected is some pretty dark stuff.”
Tyra offers something of an apology: “I was trying to empower her with the information I had,' she explained. 'I thought that was the best advice, but it would have been stomped out. And that's what would happen today. We now all understand the protections that women need. And so I say to Keenyah, 'Boo boo, I am so sorry. None of us knew. Network executives didn't know. And I did the best that I could at the time.' But she deserved more.”
ANTM's ridiculous challenges and photoshoots got more extreme with each series, upping the ante with obstacle course runways and increasingly problematic shoot concepts. The worst offender? A crime scene photoshoot where one contestant, Dionne, was asked to pose against a blood-splattered wall with a bullet wound on her head – tasteless as it is, but made much worse when you learn that her mother had been shot and left paralysed when Dionne was a child. Just an innocent coincidence? Unlikely. Dionne had revealed this information to the show’s producers during her audition process.
Elsewhere, ANTM tested the limits of what’s acceptable to air on television by forcing models to do blackface during race-swap photoshoots (yes, it happened more than once), pretend to be anorexic, bulimic and drug-addicted in a “model stereotype” shoot and pose with real homeless people for a similarly ill-judged concept designed to raise awareness.
Even one of the show’s judges, Jay Manuel, expressed his discomfort with the race-swap theme in the documentary, revealing that he’d even originally asked to be excused from the shoot. “Tyra said to me: ‘I will handle this on camera with the girls, at judging and da-da-da, just go and do your job,’” he remembers. “If you really look for it, you can see it on my face. Especially the setup for the day where I tell the girls what we’re doing.”
ANTM was a mixed bag when it came to LGBTQ+ representation. On the one hand, you had openly gay judges like Miss J. Alexander and Jay Manuel. On the other, you had contestants whose sexuality was handled with as much care as, well, you’d expect from a show that regularly put vulnerable young women in dangerous situations.
In the documentary, we’re reminded of cycle one contestant Ebony Haith, who was essentially outed during the show’s audition process. “When I first auditioned for the show, the first thing Tyra says to me, she goes, ‘We see that you’re gay,’” says Haith. “That's kind of how the world found out I was gay, and how the world met me. I hoped at least they'd pull me to the side and say, ‘How do you wanna approach this?’ They forgot the danger of that.”
You know the meme: Tyra Banks screaming at a contestant during a judging panel in a moment that will go down in reality TV history as the “Ty-rade”. The model in question was Cycle Four contestant Tiffany Richardson, who came under fire for not expressing enough emotion when she was eliminated. “I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this,” bellowed Banks to a stunned room of contestants and judges. “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!”
And if you thought that was bad, according to Manuel, the uncut rant was even more brutal – going so far that Banks eventually had to be escorted off set. “There was a lot more that was really said, and some of the things that were said were really not well-intentioned,” he says in the documentary. “I will probably never repeat the lines that were said in the room that day.”
What did Banks have to say for herself? “I just saw all that [work] going down the drain. I saw her just not believing in herself and giving up and not just giving up on a modeling competition but deeper … I went too far. You know, I lost it. It was probably bigger than her … That’s some Black girl stuff that goes real deep inside of me.” Given the fact that this is one of the only moments in the documentary that Banks offers a full apology, we’re inclined to believe Manuel’s account of this one.
ANTM’s makeover episodes gave us some of the show’s most memorable scenes, from contestants’ tears over pixie cuts to many questionable weave installations. But those girls got off easy compared to the contestants who were sent to receive dental work.
In cycle six, Dani Evans was forced to get the gap in her teeth closed, while Joanie Dodds was given the opportunity to get her snaggletooth removed. At first, Dodds was overjoyed to be receiving the procedure, but it quickly went awry, leaving her with misshapen teeth and orthodontic issues that persist to this day. “I've still got a crazy bite issue, and those problems will never be resolved,” she says. “It was fucked up, but at the end of the day, I was a grown adult woman with teeth I thought I would never fix, so I felt like I'd won the lottery.”
Most ANTM viewers will already be familiar with many scenes in the documentary. What we were less privy to when the show first aired, however, was how the judges felt about each other behind the scenes. As the cycles went on and the environment intensified, we learn that Manuel began to feel uncomfortable with “what the show was becoming,” and sent an email to Banks explaining that he’d like to leave. For three days, he was met with silence, until Banks replied with a typically blunt and pass-agg message: “I am disappointed.” Manuel was eventually persuaded to stay by the television network, but his relationship with Banks was forever changed. “It was clear I was not allowed to speak with her outside [being on camera],” he says in the documentary. “It was like psychological torture, I felt broken.”
And it seems like Banks isn’t close with any of the other former judges either. When runway coach Miss J had a life-altering stroke in 2022, he explains that while he received visits from Manuel and fellow judge Nigel Barker, Banks didn’t turn up to his bedside like his other co-stars – although she has more recently reached out to arrange a visit. “I miss being the queen of the runway. I’m the person who taught models how to walk and now I can’t walk,” says Miss J in the documentary. His most famous client? A teenage Tyra Banks.
